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VITA 
CARIORI 
FILIOLAE 

PRISCILLAE 

SACRUM 



THE AGE 
OF THE REFORMATION 



BY 



PRESERVED SMITH. Ph.D. 



Tfy^^FW% 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



s 






COPYKIOHT, 1920 
BT 

Heshy Holt and Compant 

June, IQ30 



PRINTED IN U.S.A. 



V 



PREFACE 

The excuse for writing another history of the Refpr- 
mation is the need for putting that movement in its 
proper relations to the economic and intellectual revo- 
lutions of the sixteenth century. The labor of love 
necessary for the accomplishment of this task has em- 
ployed most of my leisure for the last six years and 
has been my companion through vicissitudes of sorrow 
and of joy. A large part of the pleasure derived from 
the task has come from association with friends who 
have generously put their time and thought at my 
disposal. First of all, Professor Charles H. Haskins, 
of Hansard, having read the whole in manuscript 
and in proof with care, has thus given me the un- 
stinted benefit of his deep learning, and of his ripo 
and sane judgment. Next to him the book owes most to 
my kind friend, the Rev. Professor William Walker 
Rockwell, of Union Seminary, who has added to the 
many other favors he has done me a careful revision 
of Chapters I to VIII, Chapter XIV, and a part of 
Chapter IX. Though unknown to me personally, the 
Rev. Dr. Peter Guilday, of the Catholic University 
of Washington, consented, with gracious, character- 
istic urbanity, to read Chapters VI and VIII and a 
part of Chapter I. I am grateful to Professor N. S. 
B. Gras, of the University of Minnesota, for reading 
that part of the book directly concerned with economics 
(Chapter XI and a part of Chapter X) ; and to Pro- 
fessor Frederick A. Saunders, of Han'ard, for a like 
service in technical revision of the section on science 
in Chapter XII. While acknowledging with hearty 
thanks the priceless services of these eminent scholars, 



vi K1EFACE 

it is only fair to relieve them of all responsibility for 
any rash statements that may have escaped their 
scrutiny, as well as for any conclusions from which 
they might dissent. 

For information about manuscripts and rare books 
in Europe my thanks are due to my kind friends : Mr. 
P. S. Allen, Librarian of Merton College, Oxford, the 
so successful editor of Erasmuses Epistles; and Pro- 
fessor Carrington Lancaster, of Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity. To several libraries I owe much for the use 
of books. My friend, Professor Robert S. Fletcher, 
Librarian of Amlierst College, has often sent me vol- 
umes from that excellent store of books. My sister, 
Professor Winifred Smith, of Vassar College, has 
added to many loving services, this: that during my 
four years at Poughkeepsie, I was enabled to use the 
Vassar library. For her good offices, as well as for 
the kindness of the librarian. Miss Amy Reed, my 
thanks. My father, the Rev. Dr. Henry Preserved 
Smith, professor and librarian at Union Theological 
Seminary, has often sent me rare books from that li- 
brary ; nor can I mention this, the least of his favors, 
without adding that I owe to him much both of the in- 
spiration to follow and of the means to pursue a schol- 
ar's career. My thanks are also due to the libraries of 
Columbia and Cornell for the use of books. But the 
work could not easily have been done at all without 
the facilities offered by the Harvard Library. When 
I came to Cambridge to enjoy the riches of this store- 
house, I found the great university not less hospitable 
to the stranger within her gates than she is prolific in 
great sons. After I was already deep in debt to the 
librarian, Mr. W. C. Lane, and to many of the pro- 
fessors, a short period in the service of Harvard, as 
lecturer in history, has made me feel that I am no 
longer a stranger, but that I can count myself, in 



PREFACE vii 

some sort, one of her citizens and foster sons, at least 
a dimidiatiis alumnus. 

This book owes more to my wife than even she per- 
haps quite realizes. Not only has it been her study, 
since our marriage, to give me freedom for my work, 
but her literary advice, founded on her o^vn experience 
as writer and critic, has been of the highest value, and 
she has carefully read the proofs. 

Preseeved Smith. 
Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, 
May 16, 1920. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter I. The Old and the New 3 

1. The World. Economic changes in the later ^liddle Ages. 
Rise of the bourgeoisie. Nationalism. Individualism. 
Inventions. Printing. E.vploration. Universities. 

2. The Church. The papacy. The Councils of Constance and 
Basle. Savonarola. 

3. Causes of the Reformation. Corruption of the church not 
a main cause. Condition of the church. Indulgencea. 

Growth of a new type of lay piety. Clash of the new 
spirit with old ideals. 

4. The Mystics. The German Theology. Tauler. The Imita- 

tion of Christ. 

5. The Pre-reformers. Waldenses. Occam. Wyclif. Huss. 

6. Nationalizins; the churches. The P^cclesia Anglicana. The 

Galilean Church. German church. The Gravamina. 

7. The Humanists. Valla. Pico della Mirandola. Lef6vre 

d'fitaples. Colet. Reuchlin. Epistolae Obscurorum 
Virorum. Hutten. Erasmus. 

Chapter II. Germany 62 

1. The Leader. Luther's early life. Justification by faith 

only. The IsinetyfiTe The.'ies. The Leipzig Debate. 
Revolutionary Pamphlets of 1520. 

2. The Revolution. Condition of Germany. Maximilian I. 

Charles V. The bull Exsurge Domine burned by Luther. 
Luther at Worms and in the Wartburg. Turmoil of the 
radicals. The Revolt of the Knights. Efforts at Reform 
at the Diets of Nuremberg 1522-4. Tfie Peasants' Re- 
volt : economic causes, propaganda, course of the war. 
suppression. 

3. Formation of the Protestant Party. Defection of the radi- 

cals: the Anabaptists. Defection of the intellectuals: 
Erasmus. The Sacramentarian Schism: Zwingli. 
Growth of the Lutheran party among the upper and 
middle classes. Luther's ecclesiastical polity. Accession 
of many Free Cities, of Ernestine Saxony, Hesse, Prussia. 
Balance of Power. The Recess of Spires 1529; the 
Protest. 

4. Growth of Protestantism until the death of Luther. Diet 

of Augsburg 1530: the Confession. Accessions to the 
Protestant cause. Religious negotiations. Luther's last 
years, death and character. 

5. Relisrious War and Religious Peace. The Schmalkaldic 

VVar. The Interim. The Peace of Augsburg 1555. 
Catholic reaction and Protestant schisms. 

6. Note on Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary. 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter III. Switzerland . . . . -.- . •. , 146 

1. Zwingli. The Swiss Confederacy. Preparation for the 

Reformation. Zwingli's early life. Eeformation at 
Zurich. Defeat of Cappel. 

2. Calvin. Farel. Calvin's early life. The Institutes of the 

Christian Religion. Reformation at Geneva. Theocracy. 
The Libertines. Servetus. Character and influence of 
Calvin. 



Chapter IV. France 182 

1. Renaissance and Reformation. Condition of France. 

Francis I. War with Charles. The Christian Renais- 
sance. Lutheranism. Defection of the humanists. 

2. The Calvinist Party. Henry II. Expansion of France. 

Growth and persecution of Calvinism. 

3. The Wars of Religion. Catharine de' M^dicis. Massacre 

of Vassy. The Huguenot rebellion. Massacre of St. 
Bartholomew. The League. Henry IV. Edict of 
Nantes. Failure of Protestantism to conquer France. 

Chapter V. The Netherlands 234 

1. The Lutheran Reform. The Burgundian State. Origins 

of the Reformation. Persecution. The Anabaptists. 

2. The Calvinist Revolt. National feeling against Spain. 

Financial difficulties of Philip II. Egmont and William 
of Orange. The new bishoprics. The Compromise. The 
"Beggars." Alva's reign of terror. Requesens. Siege 
of Leyden. The Revolt of the North. Division of the 
Netherlands. Farnese. The Dutch Republic. 

Chapter VI. England 277 

1. Henry VIII and the National Church. Character of Henry 

Vlil. Foreign policy. Wolsey. Early Lutheranism. 
Tyndale's New Testament. Tracts. Anticlerical feeling. 
Divorce of Catharine of Aragon. The Submission of the 
Clergy. The Reformation Parliament 1529-36. Act in 
Restraint of Appeals. Act of Succession. Act of Su- 
premacy. Cranmer. Execution of More. Thomas Crom- 
well. Dissolution of the monastewes. Union of England 
and Wales. Alliance with the Schmalkaldic League. 
Articles of Faith. The Pilgrimage of Grace. Catholic 
reaction. War. Bankruptcy. 

2. The Reformation under Edward VI. Somerset Regent. 

Repeal of the treason and heresy laws. Rapid growth of 
Protestant opinion. The Book of Common Prayer. So- 
cial disorders. Conspiracy of Northumberland and Suf- 
folk. 

3. The Catholic reaction under Mary. Proclamation of Queen 

Jane. Accession and policy of Mary. Repeal of Tveform- 
ing Acts. Revival of Treason Laws. The Protestant 
Martyrs. 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

4. The Elizabethan Settlement 1558-88. Policy of Elizabeth. 

Respective numbers of Catholics and Protestants. Con- 
version of the masses. The Thirty-nine Articles. The 
Church of P^ngland. Underhand war with Spain. Re- 
bellion of the Northern Earls. Execution of Mary 
Stuart. The Armada. The Puritans. 

5. Ireland. 

Chapter VII. Scotland 350 

Backward condition of Scotland. Relations with Enfjland. 
Cardinal Beaton. John Knox. Battle of Pinkie. Knox 
in Scotland. The Common Band. Iconoclasm. Treaty 
of Edinburgh. The Religious Revolution. Confession of 
Faith. Queen Mary's crimes and deposition. Results of 
the Reformation. 

Chapter VIII. The Counter-Reformation . . . 371 

1. Italy. The pasran Renaissance; the Christian Renaissance. 

Sporadic Lutheranism. 

2. The Papacy 1521-90. The Sack of Rome. Reforms. 

3. The Council of Trent. First Period (1545-7). Second 

Period (1551-2). Third Period (1562-3). Results. 

4. The Company of Jesus. New monastic orders. Loyola. 

The Spiritual Exercises. Rapid growth and successes of 
the Jesuits. Their final failure. 

5. The Inquisition and the Index. The medieval Inquisition. 

The Spanish Inquisition, The Roman Inquisition. Cen- 
sorship of the press. The Index of Prohibited Books. 

Chapter IX. The Iberian Peninsula and the Expan- 
sion OF Europe 425 

1. Spain. Unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. 

Charles V. Revolts of the Communes and of the Her- 
mandad. Constitution of Spain. The Spanish empire. 
Philip II. The war with the Moriscos. The Armada. 

2. Exploration. Columbus. Conquest of Mexico and of Peru. 

Circumnavigation of the globe. Portuguese exploration 
to the East. Brazil. Decadence of Portugal. Russia. 
The Turks. 

Chapter X. Social Conditions 451 

1. Population. 

2. Wealth and Prices. Increase of wealth in modern times. 

Prices and wages in the Sixteenth Century. Value of 
money. Trend of prices. 

3. Social Institutions. The monarchy, the Coimcil of state, 

the Parliament. Public finance. Maintenance of Order. 
Sumptuary laws and "blue laws." The army. The navy. 

4. Private life and manners. The nobility, the professions; 

the clergy. The city, the house, dress, food, drink. 
Sports. Manners. Morals. Position of Women. 
Health. 



xii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter XI. The Capitalistic Revolution . . . 515 

1. The Rise of the Power of Money. Rise of capitalism. 

Banking. Mining. Commerce. Manufacture. Agri- 
culture. 

2. The Rise of the Money Power. Ascendancy of the bour- 

geoisie over the nobility, clergy, and proletariat. Class 
wars. Regulation of Labor. Pauperism. 

Chapter XII. Main Currents op Thought . . . 563 

1. Biblical and classical scholarship. Greek and Hebrew 

Bibles. Translations. The classics. The vernaculars. 

2. History. Humanistic history and church history. 

3. Political theory. The state as power: Machiavelli. Con- 

stitutional liberty: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hotman, 
Mornay, Bodin, Buchanan. R:idicals: the Utopia. 

4. Science. Inductive method. Mathematics. Zoiilogj'. 

Anatomy. Physics. Geography. Astronomy; Coper- 
nicus. Reform of the calendar. 

5. Philosophy. The Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Skep- 

tics. Effect of the Copemican theory: Bruno. 

Chapter XIII. The Temper of the Times .... 641 

L Tolerance and Intolerance. Effect of the Renaissance and 
Reformation. 

2. Witchcraft. Causes of the mania. Protests against it. 

3. Education. Schools. Effect of the Reformation. Univer- 

sities. 

4. Art. The ideals expressed. Painting. Architecture. 

Music. Effect of the Reformation and Counter-reforma- 
tion. 

5. Reading. Number of books. Typical themes. Greatness 

of the Sixteenth Century. 

Chapter XIV. The Reformation Interpreted . . 699 

1. The Religious and Political Interpretations. Burnet, Bos- 

suet, Sleidan, Sarpi. 

2. The Rationalist Critique. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robert- 

son, Hume, Gibbon, (Joethe, Lessing. 

3. The Liberal-Romantic Appreciation. Heine, Michelet, 

Froude, Hegel, Ranke, Buckle. 

4. The Economic and Evolutionary Interpretations. Marx, 

Lamprecht, Berger, Weber, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Santa- 
yana, Harnack, Beard, Janssen, Pastor, Acton. 

6. Concluding Estimate. 

Bibliography . 751 

Inde^ , , , , 819 



THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION 



\ 



CHAPTER I 
THE OLD AND THE NEW 

§ 1. The World 

Though in some sense every age is one of transition 
and over}' generation sees the world remodelled, there 
sometimes comes a change so startling and profound 
that it seems like the beginning of a new season in the 
world's great year. The snows of winter melt for 
weeks, the cold winds blow and the cool rains fall, and 
we see no change until, almost within a few days, the 
leaves and blossoms put forth their verdure, and the 
spring has come. 

Such a change in man's environment and habits as 
the world has rarely seen, took place in the generation 
that reached early manhood in the year 1500. In the- 
span of a single life — for convenience let us take that ' 
of Luther for our measure — men discovered, not in 
metaphor but in sober fact, a new heaven and a new 
earth. In those days masses of men began to read 
many books, multiplied by the new art of j^rinting. In 
those days immortal artists shot the world through 
with a matchless radiance of color and of meaning. 
In those days Vasco da Gama and Columbus and Ma- 
gellan opened the watery ways to new lands beyond 
the seven seas. In those days Copernicus established 
the momentous truth that the earth was but a tiny 
planet spinning around a vastly greater sun. In those 
days was in large part accomplished the economic 
shift from medieval gild to modern production by cap- 
ital and wages. In those days wealth was piled up in 
the coffers of the merchants, and a new power was 



1483-1546 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Antece- 
dents of the 
Reforma- 
tion 



Economic 



given to the life of the individual, of the nation, and of 
the third estate. In those days the monarchy of the 
Eoman church was broken, and large portions of her 
dominions seceded to form new organizations, gov- 
erned by other powers and animated by a different 
spirit. 

Other generations have seen one revolution take 
place at a time, the sixteenth century saw three, the 
Eise of Capitalism, the end of the Renaissance, and the 
beginning of the Reformation. All three, interacting, 
modifying each other, conflicting as they sometimes 
did, were equally the consequences, in different fields, 
of antecedent changes in man's circumstances. All 
life is an adaptation to environment; and thus from 
every alteration in the conditions in which man lives, 
usually made by his discovery of new resources or of 
hitherto unknown natural laws, a change in his habits 
of life must flow. ^ Every revolution is but an adjust- 
ment to a fresh situation, intellectual or material, or 
both. ."-^ 

Certainly, economic and psychological factors were 
alike operative in producing the three revolutions. 
The most general economic force was the change from 
''natural economy" to ''money economy," i. e. from a 
society in which payments were made chiefly by ex- 
change of goods, and by services, to one in v/hich money 
was both the agent of exchange and standard of value. 
In the Middle Ages production had been largely co- 
operative; the land belonged to the village and w^as 
apportioned out to each husbandman to till, or to all in 
common for pasture. Manufacture and commerce 
were organized by the gild — a society of equals, with 
the same course of labor and the same reward for 
each, and with no distinction save that founded on sen- 
iority — apprentice, workman, master-workman. But 
in the later Middle Ages, and more rapidly at their 



THE WORLD 5 

close, this system broke down under the necessity for 
larger capital in production and the possibility of sup- 
plying it by the increase of wealth and of banking tech- 
nique that made possible investment, rapid turn-over 
of capital, and corporate partnership. The increase 
of wealth and the changed mode of its production has 
been in large part the cause of three developments 
which in their turn became causes of revolution: the 
rise of the bourgeoisie, of nationalism, and of in- 
dividualism. 

Just as the nobles wore wearing away in civil strife < The 
and were seeing their castles shot to pieces by cannon, """"s^*^"® 
just as the clergy were wasting in supine indolence 
and were riddled by the mockery of humanists, there 
arose a new class, eager and able to take the helm of 
civilization, the moneyed men of city and of trade. 
Nouveaux riches as they were, they had an appetite for 
pleasure and for ostentation unsurpassed by any, a 
love for the world and an impatience of the meek and 
lowly church, with her ideal of poverty and of chastity. 
In their luxurious and leisured homes they sheltered 
the arts that made life richer and the philosophy, or 
religion, that gave them a good conscience in the work 
they loved. Both Renaissance and Reformation were 
dwellers in the cities and in the marts of commerce. 

It was partly the rise of the third estate, but partly National 
also cultural factors, such as the perfecting of the 
modern tongues, that made the national state one of 
the characteristic products of modem times. Com- 
merce needs order and strong government; the men 
who paid the piper called the tune; police and profes- 
sional soldiery made the state, once so racked by 
feudal wars, peaceful at home and dreaded abroad. If 
the consequence of this was an increase in royal power, 
the kings were among those who had greatness thrust 
upon them, rather than achieving it for themselves. 



ualism 



6 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

They were but the symbols of the new, proudly con- 
scious nation, and the police commissioners of the 
large bankers and traders. 
Individ- The rcactiou of nascent capitalism on the individual 

was no less marked than on state and society, though 
it was not the only cause of the new sense of personal 
worth. Just as the problems of science and of art be- 
came most alluring, the man with sufficient leisure and 
resource to solve them was developed by economic 
forces. In the Middle Ages men had been less enter- 
prising and less self-conscious. Their thought was 
not of themselves as individuals so much as of their 
membership in groups. The peoples were divided into 
well-marked estates, or classes ; industry was co-opera- 
tive; even the great art of the cathedrals was rather 
gild-craft than the expression of a single genius ; even 
learning was the joint property of universities, not the 
private accumulation of the lone scholar. But with 
every expansion of the ego either through the acqui- 
sition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great ex- 
ploits, came a rising self-consciousness and self-con- 
fidence, and this was the essence of the individualism 
so often noted as one of the contrasts between modem 
and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a 
large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of 
life and of history, is conscious only of object; the 
trained and leisured intellect discovers, literally by 
''reflection," the subjective. He is then no longer con- 
tent to be anything less than himself, or to be lost in 
anything greater. 

Just as men were beginning again to glory in their 
own powers came a series of discoveries that totally 
transformed the world they lived in. So vast a change 
is made in human thought and habit by some appar- 
ently trivial technical inventions that it sometimes 



THE WORLD 7 

seems as if the race were like a child that had boarded 
a locomotive and half accidentally started it, but could 
neither guide nor stop it. Civilization was bom with 
the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of Inventions 
animals, writing, and navigation, all of them, together 
with important astronomical discoveries, made prior 
to the beginnings of recorded history. On this capital 
mankind traded for some millenniums, for neither 
classic times nor the Dark Ages added much to the 
practical sciences. But, beginning with the thirteenth 
century, discovery followed discovery, each more im- 
portant in its consequences than its last. One of the 
first steps was perhaps the recovery of lost ground by ^ 
the restoration of the classics. Gothic art and the 
vernacular literatures testify to the intellectual activ- 
ity of the time, but they did not create the new ele- 
ments of life that were brought into being by the in- 
ventors. 

What a difference in private life was made by the in- 
troduction of chimneys and glass windows, for glass, 
though known to antiquity, was not commonly applied 
to the openings that, as the etymology of the English 
word implies, let in the wind! By the fifteenth cen- 
tury the power of lenses to magnify and refract had 
been utilized, as mirrors, then as spectacles, to be fol- 
lowed two centuries later by telescopes and micro- 
scopes. Useful chemicals were now first applied to 
various manufacturing processes, such as the tinning 
of iron. The compass, with its weird power of point- 
ing north, guided the mariner on uncharted seas. The 
obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art 
of war more than all the famous conquerors had done, 
and the polity of states more than any of the renowned 
legislators of antiquity. The equally obscure inventor 
of mechanical clocks — a great improvement on the 



8 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles — made 
possible a new precision and regularity of daily life, 
an untold economy of time and effort. 
Printing But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the 

glory of John Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor 
and in their own times obscure geniuses who carry out 
to fulfilment a great idea at much sacrifice to them- 
selves. The demand for books had been on the in- 
crease for a long time, and every effort was made to 
reproduce them as rapidly and cheaply as possible by 
the hand of expert copyists, but the applications of 
this method produced slight result. The introduction 
of paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, 
furnished one of the indispensable pre-roquisites to the 
multiplication of cheap volumes. In the early fif- 
teenth century, the art of the wood-cutter and engraver 
had advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be 
printed in this manner, i. e. from carved blocks. This 
was usually, or at first, done only with books in which 
a small amount of text went with a large amount of 
illustration. There are extant, for example, six 
editions of the Biblia Pauperum, stamped by this 
method. It was afterwards applied, chiefly in Hol- 
land, to a few other books for which there was a large 
demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example, 
and a guide-book to Rome known as the Mirabilia 
Urbis Romae. But at best this method was extremely 
unsatisfactory ; the blocks soon wore out, the text was 
blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense was 
large. 

The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was 
therefore not, as the name implies, printing, or impres- 
sion, but typography, or the use of tj]ye. The printer 
♦ first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was called the 

punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the ma- 
trix in which he was able to found a large number of 



THE WORLD 9 

exactly identical tyj)es of metal, usually of lead. 
These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made 
it possible satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a 
large number of copies of the same text, and, when that 
was done, the types could be taken apart and used for 
another work. 

The earliest surviving specimen of printing — not 
counting a few undated letters of indulgence — is a 
fragment on the last judgment completed at Mayence 
before 1447. In 1450 Gutenberg made a partnership 
with the rich goldsmith John Fust, and from their 
press issued, within the next five years, the famous 
Bible with 42 lines to a page, and a Donatus (Latin 
grammar) of 32 lines. The printer of the Bible with 
36 lines to a page, that is the next oldest surviving 
monument, was apparently a helper of Gutenberg, who 
set up an independent press in 1454. Legible, clean- 
cut, comparatively cheap, these books demonstrated 
once for all the success of the new art, even though, 
for illuminated initials, they were still dependent on 
the hand of the scribe. 

In those days before patents the new invention Books and 
spread with wonderful rapidity, reaching Italy in 1465, l^**^"^g 
Paris in 1470, London in 1480, Stockholm in 1482, Con- 
stantinople in 1487, Lisbon in 1490, and Madrid in 
1499. Only a few backward countries of Europe re- 
mained without a press. By the year 1500 the names 
of more than one thousand printers are known, and 
the titles of about 30,000 printed works. Assuming 
that the editions were small, averaging 300 copies, there 
would have been in Europe by 1500 about 9,000,000 
books, as against the few score thousand manusciipts 
that lately had held all the precious lore of time. In 
a few years the price of books sank to one-eighth of 
what it had been before. "The gentle reader" had 
started on his career. 



10 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

The importance of printing cannot be over-estimated. 
There are few events like it in the history of the world. 
The whole gigantic swing of modern democracy and of 
the scientific spirit was released by it. The veil of 
the temple of religion and of knowledge was rent in 
twain, and the arcana of the priest and clerk exposed 
to the gaze of the people. The reading public became 
.-'the supreme court before whom, from this time, all 
cases must be argued. The conflict of opinions and 
parties, of privilege and freedom, of science and ob- 
scurantism, was transferred from the secret chamber 
of a small, privileged, professional, and sacerdotal 
coterie to the arena of the reading public. 
Exploration It is amazing, but true, that within fifty years after 
this exploit, mankind should have achieved another 
like unto it in a widely different sphere. The horror 
of the sea was on the ancient world ; a heart of oak and 
triple bronze was needed to venture on the ocean, and 
its annihilation was one of the blessings of the new 
earth promised by the Apocalypse. All through the 
centuries Europe remained sea-locked, until the bold 
Portuguese mariners venturing ever further and fur- 
ther south along the coast of Africa, finally doubled 
the Cape of Good Hope — a feat first performed by 
Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, though it was not until 
1498 that Vasco da Gama reached India by this 
method. 

Still unconquered lay the stormy and terrible Atlan- 
tic, 

Where, beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote 

_^ sea-gates. 
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death 
waits. 

But the ark of Europe found her dove — as the name 
Columbus signifies — to fly over the wild, western 



ties 



THE WORLD 11 

waves, and bring her news of strange countries. The 
effect of these discoveries, enoiTnously and increas- 
ingly important from the material standpoint, was 
first felt in the widening of the imagination. Camoens 
wrote the epic of Da Gama, More placed his Utopia in 
America, and Montaigne speculated on the curious cus- 
toms of the redskins. Ariosto wrote of the wonders 
of the new world in his poem, and Luther occasionally 
alluded to them in his sermons. 

If printing opened the broad road to popular edu- Universi- 
cation, other and more formal means to the same end 
were not neglected. One of the great innovations of 
the Middle Ages was the university. These perma- 
nent corporations, dedicated to the advancement of 
learning and the instruction of youth, first arose, early 
in the twelfth century, at Salerno, at Bologna and at 
Paris. As off-shoots of these, or in imitation of them, 
many similar institutions sprang up in every land of 
western Europe. The last half of the fifteenth century 
was especially rich in such foundations. In Germany, 
from 1450 to 1517, no less than nine new academies 
were started: Greifswald 1456, Freiburg in the 
Breisgau 1460, Basle 1460, Ingolstadt 1472, Treves 
1473, Mayence 1477, Tiibingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502, 
and Frankfort on the Oder 1506. Though generally 
founded by papal charter, and maintaining a strong 
ecclesiastical flavor, these institutions were under the 
direction of the civil government. 

In France three new universities opened their doors 
during the same period: Valence 1459, Nantes 1460, 
Bourges 1464. These were all placed under the gen- 
eral supervision of the local bishops. The great uni- 
versity of Paris was gradually changing its character. 
From the most cosmopolitan and international of 
bodies it was fast becoming strongly nationalist, and 
was the chief center of an Erastian Gallicanism. Its 



12 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

tremendous weight cast against the Reformation was 
doubtless a chief reason for the failure of that move- 
ment in France. 

Spain instituted seven new universities at this time : 
Barcelona 1450, Saragossa 1474, Palma 1483, Siguenza 
1489, Alcala 1499, Valencia 1500, and Seville 1504. 
Italy and England remained content with the acad- 
emies they already had, but many of the smaller coun- 
tries now started native universities. Thus Pressburg 
was founded in Hungary in 1465, Upsala in Sweden in 
1477, Copenhagen in 1478, Glasgow in 1450, and Aber- 
deen in 1494. The number of students in each founda- 
tion fluctuated, but the total was steadily on the in- 
crease. 

Naturally, the expansion of the higher education 
brought with it an increase in the number and excel- 
lence of the schools. Particularly notable is the work 
of the Brethren of the Common Life, who devoted 
themselves almost exclusively to teaching boys. Some 
of their schools, as Deventer, attained a reputation like 
that of Eton or Rugby today. 

The spread of education was not only notable in 
itself, but had a more direct result in furnishing a 
shelter to new movements until they were strong 
enough to do without such support. It is significant 
that the Reformations of Wyclif , Huss, and Luther, all 
started in universities. 
Growth of As the tide rolls in, the waves impress one more than 
intelligence l\^^^ flood beneath them. Behind, and far transcending, 
the particular causes of this and that development lies 
the operation of great biological laws, selecting a type 
for survival, transforming the mind and body of men 
slowly but surely. Whether due to the natural selec- 
tion of circumstance, or to the inward urge of vital 
force, there seems to be no doubt that the average 
intellect, not of leading thinkers or of select groups, 



THE CHURCH 



13 



but of the European races as a whole, has been steadily 
gTOwing greater at every period during which it can 
be measured. Moreover, the monastic vow of chastity 
tended to sterilize and thus to eliminate the religi- 
ously-minded sort. Operating over a long period, and 
on both sexes, this cause of the growing secularization 
of the world, though it must not be exaggerated, can- 
not be overlooked. 



§ 2. The Church 

Over against "the world," "the church." ... As 
the Eeformation was primarily a religious movement, 
some account of the church in the later Middle Ages 
must be given. \ How Christianity was immaculately ♦ 
conceived in the heart of the Galilean cai-penter and 
born with words of beauty and power such as no other 
man ever spoke ;\how it inherited from him its back- 
ground of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture ; 
how it was enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who 
assimilated it to the current mysteries with their myth 
of a dying and rising god and of salvation by sacra- 
mental rite ; how it decked itself in the white robes of 
Greek philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony 
and custom snatched from the flamen's vestry; how it 
created a pantheon of saints to take the place of the 
old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and 
then the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church 
on the immovable rock of the Eternal City, asserting 
like her a dominion without bounds of space or time ; 
how it conquered and tamed the barbarians; — all this 
lies outside the scope of the present work to describe. 
But of its later fortunes some brief account must be 
given. 

By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged tri- 
umphant from their long strife with the German em- 
perors, successfully asserted their claim to the suze- 



Innocent 

III 

1198-1216 



14 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Boniface 
VIII 

1294-1303 



The 

Babylonian 
Captivity 
1309-76 



The Great 

Schism 

1378-1417 



Councils 
Pisa, 1409 

Constance 
1414-18 



rainty of all Western Europe. Innocent III took 
realms in fief and dictated to kings. The pope, assert- 
ing that the spiritual power was as much superior to 
the civil as the sun was brighter than the moon, acted 
as the vicegerent of God on earth. But this suprem- 
acy did not last long unquestioned. Just a century 
after Innocent III, Boniface VIII was worsted in a 
quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, 
Clement V, a Frenchman, by transferring the papal 
capital to Avignon, virtually made the supreme pon- 
tiffs subordinate to the French government and thus 
weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This 
''Babylonian Captivity" was followed by a greater 
misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, for the 
effort to transfer the papacy back to Eome led to the 
election of two popes, who, with their successors, re- 
spectively ruled and mutually anathematized each 
other from the two rival cities. The difficulty of de- 
ciding which was the true successor of Peter was so 
great that not only were the kingdoms of Europe di- 
vided in their allegiance, but doctors of the church and 
canonized saints could be found among the supporters 
of either line. There can be no doubt that respect for 
the pontificate greatly suffered by the schism, which 
was in some respects a direct preparation for the 
greater division brought about by the Protestant seces- 
sion. 

The attempt to end the schism at the Council of Pisa 
resulted only in the election of a third pope. The 
situation was finally dealt with by the Council of Con- 
stance which deposed two of the popes and secured the 
voluntary abdication of the third. The synod further 
strengthened the church by executing the heretics Huss 
and Jerome of Prague, and by passing decrees in- 
tended to put the government of the church in the 
hands of representative assemblies. It asserted that it 



THE CHURCH 15 

had power directly from Christ, that it was supreme in 
matters of faith, and in matters of discipline so far as 
they affected the schism, and that the pope could not 
dissolve it without its own consent. By the decree 
Frequens it provided for the regular summoning of 
councils at short intervals. Beyond this, other efforts 
to reform the morals of the clergy proved abortive, 
for after long discussion nothing of importance was 
done. 

For the next century the policy of the popes was 
determined by the wish to assert their superiority i^^^_^^ 
over the councils. The Synod of Basle reiterated all 
the claims of Constance, and passed a number of laws 
intended to diminish the papal authority and to de- 
prive the pontiff of much of his ill-gotten revenues — 
annates, fees for investiture, and some other taxes. 
It was successful for a time because protected by the 
governments of France and Germany, for, though dis- 
solved by Pope Eugene IV in 1433, it refused to listen 
to his command and finallj^ extorted from him a bull 
ratifying the conciliar claims to supremacy. 

In the end, however, the popes triumphed. The bull. 
Execrahilis denounced as a damnable abuse the appeal 1458 
to a future council, and the Pastor Aeternus reasserted 1515 
in sweeping terms the supremacy of the pope, repeal- 
ing all decrees of Constance and Basle to the contrary, 
as well as other papal bulls. • 

At Rome the popes came to occupy the position of Thesecu- 
princes of one of the Italian states, and were elected, lyization 
like the doges of Venice, by a small oligarchy. "Within papacy 
seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini, 
Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more 
than one pontiff, and a majority of the others were 
nearly related by blood or marriage to one of these 
great stocks. The cardinals were appointed from the 
pontiff's sons or nephews, and the numerous other of- 



16 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Nicholas V 
1447-55 



1453 



Calixtus III 
1455^ 

Pius II 
1458-64 



Paul II 
1464-71 

Sixtus IV 
1471-84 



Innocent 

VIII 

1484-92 



fices in their patronage, save as they were sold, were 
distributed to personal or political friends. 

Like other Italian princes the popes became, in the 
fifteenth century, distinguished patrons of arts and let- 
ters. The golden age of the humanists at Rome began 
under Nicholas V who employed a number of them to 
make translations from Greek. It is characteristic of 
the complete secularization of the States of the Church 
that a number of the literati pensioned by him were 
skeptics and scoffers. Valla, who mocked the papacy, 
ridiculed the monastic orders, and attacked the Bible 
and Christian ethics, was given a prebend; Savona- 
rola, the most earnest Christian of his age, was put to 
death. 

The fall of Constantinople gave a certain European 
character to the policy of the pontiffs after that date, 
for the menace of the Turk seemed so imminent that 
the heads of Christendom did all that was possible to 
unite the nations in a crusade. This was the keynote 
of the statesmanship of Calixtus III and of his succes- 
sor, Pius II. Before his elevation to the see of Peter 
this talented writer, known to literature as Aeneas 
Sylvius, had, at the Council of Basle, published a 
strong argument against the extreme papal claims, 
which he afterwards, as pope, retracted. His zeal 
against the Turk and against his old friends the hu- 
manists lent a moral tone to his pontificate, but his 
feeble attempts to reform abuses were futile. 

The colorless reign of Paul II was followed by that 
of Sixtus IV, a man whose chief passion was the ag- 
grandizement of his family. He carried nepotism to 
an extreme and by a policy of judicial murder very 
nearly exterminated his rivals, the Colonnas. 

The enormous bribes paid by Innocent VIII for his 
election were recouped by his sale of oflices and spir- 
itual graces, and by taking a tribute from the Sultan, 



1452-98 



THE CHURCH 17 

in return for which he refused to proclaim a crusade. 
The most important act of his pontificate was the pub- 
]ication of the bull against witchcraft. 

The name of Alexander VI has attained an evil em- Alexander 
inence of infamy on account of his own crimes and YJ^ 
vices and those of his children, Caesar Borgia and 
Lucretia. One proof that the public conscience of 
Italy, instead of being stupificd by the orgy of wicked- 
ness at Rome was rather becoming aroused by it, is 
found in the appearance, just at this time, of a number 
of preachers of repentance. These men, usually friars, 
started ** revivals" marked by the customary phe- 
nomena of sudden conversion, hysteria, and extreme 
austerity. The greatest of them all was the Domin- Savonarola 
ican Jerome Savonarola who, though of mediocre in- 
tellectual gifts, by the passionate fervor of his convic- 
tions, attained the position of a prophet at Florence. 
He began preaching here in 1482, and so stirred his 
audiences that many wept and some were petrified with 
horror. His credit was greatly raised by his predic- 
tion of the invasion of Charles VIII of France in 1494. 
He succeeded in driving out the Medici and in introduc- 
ing a new constitution of a democratic nature, which 
he believed was directly sanctioned by God. He at- 
tacked the morals of the clergy and of the people and, 
besides renovating his o\vn order, suppressed not only 
public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The peo- 
ple burned their cards, false hair, indecent pictures, 
and the like ; many women left their husbands and en- 
tered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and blas- 
phemers had their tongues pierced. A police was in- 
stituted with power of searching houses. 

It was only the pope's fear of Charles VIII that 
prevented his dealing with this dangerous reformer, 
who now began to attack the vices of the curia. In 
1495, however, the friar was summoned to Rome, and 



18 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

refused to go; he was then forbidden to preach, and 
disobeyed. In Lent 1496 he proclaimed the duty 
of resisting the pope when in error. In November 
a new brief proposed changes in the constitution 
of his order which would bring him more directly 
under the power of Eome. Savonarola replied that 
he did not fear the excommunication of the sinful 
church, which, when launched against him May 12, 
1497, only made him more defiant. Claiming to be 
commissioned directly from God, he appealed to the 
powers to summon a general council against the pope. 

At this juncture one of his opponents, a Franciscan, 
Francis da Puglia, proposed to him the ordeal by fire, 
stating that though he expected to be burnt he was 
willing to take the risk for the sake of the faith. The 
challenge refused by Savonarola was taken up by his 
friend Fra Domenico da Pescia, and although forbidden 
by Alexander, the ordeal was sanctioned by the Sig- 
nory and a day set. A dispute as to whether Domenico 
should be allowed to take the host or the crucifix into 
the flames prevented the experiment from taking place, 
and the mob, furious at the loss of its promised spec- 
tacle, refused further support to the discredited 
leader. For some years, members of his own order, 
who resented the severity of his reform, had cherished 
a grievance against him, and now they had their 
chance. Seized by the Signory, he was tortured and 
forced to confess that he was not a prophet, and on 
May 22, 1498, was condemned, with two companions, to 
be hung. After the speedy execution of the sentence, 
which the sufferers met calmly, their bodies were 
burnt. All effects of Savonarola's career, political, 
moral, and religious, shortly disappeared. 

Alexander was followed by a Eovere who took the 
Julius II name of Julius II. Notwithstanding his advanced age 
this pontiff proved one of the most vigorous and able 



1503-13 



THE CHURCH 19 

statesman of the time and devoted himself to the ag- 
grandizement, by war and diplomacy, of the Papal 
States. He did not scruple to use his spiritual thun- 
ders against his political enemies, as when he excom- j^q^ 
municated the Venetians. He found himself at odds 
with both the Emperor Maximilian and Louis XII of 
France, who summoned a schismatic council at Pisa. I5ii 
Supported by some of the cardinals this body revived 
the legislation of Constance and Basle, but fell into 
disrepute when, by a master stroke of policy, Julius 1^12-16 
convoked a council at Rome. This synod, the Fifth 
Lateran, lasted for four years, and endeavored to deal 
with a crusade and with reform. All its efforts at re- 
form proved abortive because they were either choked, 
while in course of discussion, by the Curia, or, when 
passed, were rendered ineffective by the dispensing 
power. 

While the synod was still sitting Julius died and a i5j3'^2i 
new pope was chosen. This was the son of Lorenzo 
the Magnificent, the Medici Leo X. Having taken the 
tonsure at the age of seven, and received the red hat 
six years later, he donned the tiara at the early age of 
thirty-eight. His words, as reported by the Venetian 
ambassador at Rome, "Let us enjoy the papacy, since 
God has given it to us," exactly express his program. 
To make life one long carnival, to hunt game and to 
witness comedies and the antics of buffoons, to hear 
marvellous talcs of the new world and voluptuous 
verses of the humanists and of the great Ariosto, to 
enjoy music and to consume the most delicate viands 
and the most delicious wines — this was what he lived 
for. Free and generous with money, he prodigally 
wasted the revenues of three pontificates. Spending 
no less than 6000 ducats a month on cards and gra- 
tuities, he was soon forced to borrow to the limit of 
his credit. Little recked he that Germany was being 



20 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Corruption 
of the 
church not 
amain 
cause of the 
Reforma- 
tion 



reft from the church by a poor friar. His irresolute 
policy was incapable of pursuing any public end con- 
sistently, save that he employed the best Latinists of 
the time to give elegance to his state papers. His 
method of governing was the purely personal one, to 
pay his friends and flatterers at the expense of the 
common good. One of his most characteristic letters 
expresses his intention of rewarding with high office a 
certain gentleman who had given him a dinner of 
lampreys. 

§ 3. Causes of the Eeformatioit 
In the eyes of the early Protestants the Reformation 
was a return to primitive Christianity and its princi- 
pal cause was the corruption of the church. That 
there was great depravity in the church as elsewhere 
cannot be doubted, but there are several reasons for 
thinking that it could not have been an important 
cause for the loss of so many of her sons. In the first 
place there is no good ground for believing that the 
moral condition of the priesthood was worse in 1500 
than it had been for a long time ; indeed, there is good 
evidence to the contrary, that things were tending to 
improve, if not at Rome yet in many parts of Christen- 
dom. If objectionable practices of the priests had 
been a sufficient cause for the secession of whole na- 
tions, the Reformation would have come long before 
it actually did. Again, there is good reason to doubt 
that the mere abuse of an institution has ever led to its 
complete overthrow; as long as the institution is re- 
garded as necessary, it is rather mended than ended. 
Thirdly, many of the acts that seem corrupt to us, gave 
little offence to contemporaries, for they were uni- 
versal. If the church sold offices and justice, so did 
the civil governments. If the clergy lived impure 
lives, so did the laity. Probably the standard of the 



CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION 21 

church (save in special circumstances) was no worse 
than that of civil life, and in some respects it was 
rather more decent. Finally, there is some reason to 
suspect of exaggeration the charges preferred by the 
innovators. Like all reformers they made the most of 
their enemy's faults. Invective like theirs is common 
to every generation and to all spheres of life. It is 
true that the denunciation of the priesthood comes not 
only from Protestants and satirists, but from popes 
and councils and canonized saints, and that it bulks 
large in medieval literature. Nevertheless, it is both a 
priori probable and to some extent historically verifi- 
able that the evil was more noisy, not more potent, than 
the good. But though the corruptions of the church 
were not a main cause of the Protestant secession, they 
furnished good excuses for attack; the Reformers were 
scandalized by the divergence of the practice and the 
pretensions of the official representatives of Chris- 
tianity, and their attack was envenomed and the break 
made easier thereby. It is therefore necessary to say 
a few words about those abuses at which public opinion 
then took most offence. 

Manj^ of these were connected with money. The Abuses: 
common man's conscience was wounded by the smart '"^""^ 
in his purse. The wealth of the church was enormous, 
though exaggerated by those contemporaries who esti- 
mated it at one-third of the total real estate of West- 
ern Europe. In addition to revenues from her own 
land the church collected tithes and taxes, including 
"Peter's pence" in England, Scandina^da and Poland. 
The clergy paid dues to the curia, among them the 
servitia charged on the bishops and the annates levied 
on the income of the first year for each appointee to 
high ecclesiastical office, and the price for the arch- 
bishop's pall. The priests recouped themselves by 
charging high fees for their ministrations. At a time 



22 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

when the Christian ideal was one of '* apostolic pov- 
erty" the riches of the clergy were often felt as a 
scandal to the pious. 

Though the normal method of appointment to civil 
office was sale, it was felt as a special abuse in the 
church and was branded by the name of simony. Leo 
X made no less than 500,000 ducats ^ annually from 
the sale of more than 2000 offices, most of which, being 
sinecures, eventually came to be regarded as annuities, 
with a salary amounting to about 10 per cent, of the 
purchase price. 

Justice was also venal, in the church no less than in 
the state. Pardon was obtainable for all crimes for, as 
a papal vice-chamberlain phrased it, ' ' The Lord wishes 
not the death of a sinner but that he should pay and 
live." Dispensations from the laws against marriage 
within the prohibited degrees were sold. Thus an or- 
dinary man had to pay 16 grossi ^ for dispensation to 
marry a woman who stood in "spiritual relation- 
ship" ^ to him; a noble had to pay 20 grossi for the 
same privilege, and a prince or duke 30 grossi. First 
cousins might marry for the payment of 27 grossi ; an 
uncle and niece for from three to four ducats, though 
this was later raised to as much as sixty ducats, at 
least for nobles. Marriage within the first degree of 
affinity (a deceased wife's mother or daughter by an- 
other husband) was at one tim.e sold for about ten 
ducats ; marriage within the second degree ^ was per- 

1 A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time 
when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has. 

2 The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which 
varied considerably in value. It may here be taken as intrinsically 
worth about 8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many 
times the purchasing power that it now has. 

3 A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were 
sponsors to the same child at baptism. 

* Presumably of afiinity, i.e., a wife's eieter, but there is nothing to 



CAUSES OF THE REFOEMATION 23 

mitted for from 300 to 600 grossi. Hardly necessar}'' 
to add, as was done: ''Note well, that dispensations or 
graces of this sort are not given to poor jDeople."^ 
Dispensations from vows and from the requirements 
of ecclesiastical law, as for example those relating to 
fasting, were also to be obtained at a price. 

One of the richest sources of ecclesiastical revenue Indulgences 
was the sale of indulgences, or the remission by the 
pope of the temporal penalties of sin, both penance 
in this life and the pains of purgatory. The practice 
of giving these pardons first arose as a means of assur- 
ing heaven to those warriors who fell fighting the in- 
fidel. In 1300. Boniface VIII granted a plenary indul- 
gence to all who made the pilgrimage to the jubilee at 
Rome, and the golden harvest reaped on this occasion 
induced his successors to take the same means of im- 
parting spiritual graces to the faithful at frequent in- 
tervals. In the fourteenth century the pardons were 
extended to all who contributed a sum of money to a 
pious purpose, whether they came to Rome or not, and, 
as the agents who were sent out to distribute those 
pardons were also given power to confess and absolve, 
the papal letters were naturally regarded as no less 
than tickets of admission to heaven. In the thirteenth 
centurj' the theologians had discovered that there was 
at the disposal of the church and her head an abundant 
''treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints," 
which might be applied vicariously to anyone by the 
pope. In the fifteenth century the claimed power to 
free living men from purgatory w^as extended to the 

show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one 
time the pope proposed that the natural son of Herry VIII, the Duke 
of Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary. 

1 "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationcs non 
conceduntur pauperibus." Tojca cancellariac apostolicae, in E. Fried- 
berg: Lehrhuch des katholischcn und cvangelischen Kirchenrechts, 
1903, pp. 389ff. 



24 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

dead, and this soon became one of the most profitable 
branches of the ''holy trade." 

The means of obtaining indulgences varied. Some- 
times they were granted to those who made a pilgrim- 
age or who would read a pious book. Sometimes they 
were used to raise money for some public work, a hos- 
pital or a bridge. But more and more they became an 
ordinary means for raising revenue for the curia. 
How thoroughly commercialized the business of selling 
grace and remission of the penalties of sin had become 
is shown by the fact that the agents of the pope were 
often bankers who organized the sales on purely busi- 
ness lines in return for a percentage of the net receipts 
plus the indirect profits accruing to those who handle 
large sums. Of the net receipts the financiers usually 
got about ten per cent.; an equal amount was given 
to the emperor or other civil ruler for permitting the 
pardoners to enter his territory, commissions were 
also paid to the local bishop and clergy, and of course 
the pedlars of the pardons received a proportion of 
the profits in order to stimulate their zeal. On the 
average from thirty to forty-five per cent, of the gross 
receipts were turned into the Eoman treasury. 

It is natural that public opinion should have come 
to regard indulgences with aversion. Their bad moral 
effect was too obvious to be disregarded, the com- 
pounding with sin for a payment destined to satisfy 
the greed of unscrupulous prelates. Their economic 
effects were also noticed, the draining of the country 
of money with which further to enrich a corrupt Ital- 
ian city. Many rulers forbade their sale in their ter- 
ritories, because, as Duke George of Saxony, a good 
Catholic, expressed it, before Luther was heard of, 
*'they cheated the simple layman of his soul." Hut- 
ten mocked at Pope Julius II for selling to others the 
heaven he oould not win himself. Pius 11 was obliged 



of clergy 



CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION 25 

to confess: **If we send ambassadors to ask aid of the 
princes, they are mocked ; if we impose a tithe on the 
clergy, appeal is made to a future council ; if we pub- 
lish an indulgence and invite contributions in return 
for spiritual favors, we are charged with greed. Peo- 
ple think all is done merely for the sake of extorting 
money. No one trusts us. We have no more credit 
than a bankrupt merchant. ' ' 

Much is said in the literature of the latter Middle Immorality 
Ages about the immorality of the clergy. This class 
has always been severely judged because of its high 
pretensions. Moreover the vow of celibacy was too 
hard to keep for most men and for some women ; that 
many priests, monks and nuns broke it cannot be 
doubted. And yet there was a sprinkling of saintly 
parsons like him of whom Chancer said 

"Who Christes lore and his apostles twelve 
He taught, but first he folwed it himselve, 

and there were many others who kept up at least the 
appearance of decency. But here, as always, the bad 
attracted more attention than the good. 

The most reliable data on the subject are found in 
the records of church visitations, both those undertaken 
by the Reformers and those occasionally attempted by 
the Catholic prelates of the earlier period. Every- 
where it was proved that a large proportion of the 
clergy were both wofully ignorant and morally un- 
worthy. Besides the priests who had concubines, 
there were many given to drink and some who kept 
taverns, gaming rooms and worse places. Plunged in 
gross ignorance and superstition, those blind leaders 
of the blind, who won great reputations as exorcists 
or as wizards, were unable to understand the Latin 
service, and sometimes to repeat even the Lord's 
prayer or creed in any language. 



26 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

Piety The Reformation, like most other revolutions, 

came not at the lowest ebb of abuse, but at a time 
when the tide had already begun to run, and to run 
strongly, in the direction of improvement. One can 
hardly find a sweeter, more spiritual religion anywhere 
than that set forth in Erasmus's Enchiridion, or in 
More's Utopia, or than that lived by Vitrier and Colet. 
Many men, who had not attained to this conception of 
the true beauty of the gospel, were yet thoroughly dis- 
gusted with things as they were and quite ready to sub- 
stitute a new and purer conception and practice for 
the old, mechanical one. 

Evidence for this is the popularity of the Bible 
and other devotional books. Before 1500 there were 
' nearly a hundred editions of the Latin Vulgate, and 
a number of translations into German and French. 
There were also nearly a hundred editions, in Latin 
and various vernaculars, of The Imitation of Christ. 
There was so flourishing a crop of devotional hand- 
books that no others could compete with them in 
popularity. For those who could not read there 
were the. Biblia Pauperum, picture-books with a mini- 
mum of text, and there were sermons by popular 
preachers. If some of these tracts and homilies were 
crude and superstitious, others were filled with a spirit 
of love and honesty. Whereas the passion for pil- 
grimages and relics seemed to increase, there were 
men of clear vision to denounce the attendant evils. A 
new feature was the foundation of lay brotherhoods, 
like that of the Common Life, with the purpose of cul- 
tivating a good character in the world, and of render- 
ing social service. The number of these brotherhoods 
was great and their popularity general. 
Clash of Had the forces already at work within the church 

"!thor been allowed to operate, probably much of the moral 
institutions reform desired by the best Catholics would have been 



CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION 27 

acccmplislied quietly without the violent rending of 
Christian unity that actually took place. But the fact 
is, that such reforms never would or could have satis- 
fied the spirit of the age. Men were not only shocked ^ 
by the abuses in the church, but they had outgrown 
some of her ideals. Not all of her teaching, nor most of 
it, had become repugnant to them, for it has often been 
pointed out that the Reformers kept more of the doc- 
trines of Catholicism than they threw away, but in cer- 
tain respects they repudiated, not the abuse but the 
very principle on which the church acted. In four 
respects, particularly, the ideals of the new age were 
incompatible with those of the Roman communion. 

The first of these was the sacramental theory of sal- Sacramen- 
vation and its corollary, the sacerdotal power. Ac- ofthe^°^ 
cording to Catholic doctrine grace is imparted to the church 
believer by means of certain rites : baptism, confirma- 
tion, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy or- 
ders, and matrimony. Baptism is the necessary pre- 
requisite to the enjoyment of the others, for -without it 
the unwashed soul, whether heathen or child of Chris- 
tian parents, would go to eternal fire; but the "most 
excellent of the sacraments" is the eucharist, in 
which Christ is mysteriously sacrificed by the priest 
to the Father and his body and blood eaten and drunk 
by the worshippers. "Without these rites there was no 
salvation, and they acted automatically {ex opere 
operato) on the soul of the faithful who put no active 
hindrance in their way. Save baptism, they could be 
administered only by priests, a special caste with "an 
indelible character" marking them off from the laity. 
Needless to remark the immense power that this doc- 
trine gave the clergy in a believing age. They were 
made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and 
their moral character had no more to do with their 
binding and loosing sentence than does the moral char- 



28 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Other- 
worldliness 



Worship 
of saints 



acter of a secular ofiQcer affect Ms official acts. Add to 
this that the priests were unbound by ties of family, 
that by confession they entered into everyone's pri- 
vate life, that they were not amenable to civil justice 
— and their position as a privileged order was secure. 
The growing self-assurance and enlightenment of a 
nascent individualism found this distinction intoler- 
able. 

Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash 
with the developing powers of the new age was its 
pessimistic and ascetic other- worldliness. The ideal of 
the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this 
world, all its pomps and learning and art were but 
snares to s-educe men from salvation. Reason was 
called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom like 
the rose. Wealth was shunned as dangerous, mar- 
riage deprecated as a necessary evil. Fasting, scourg- 
ing, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated as the surest 
roads to heaven. If a good layman might barely 
shoulder his way through the strait and narrow gate, 
the highest graces and heave»nly rewards were vouch- 
safed to the faithful monk. All this grated harshly on 
the minds of the generations that began to find life 
glorious and happy, not evil but good. 

Third, the worship of the saints, which had once 
been a stepping-stone to higher things, was now widely 
regarded as a stumbling-block. Though far from a 
scientific conception of natural law, many men had be- 
come sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see 
in the current hagiolatry a sort of polytheism. Eras- 
mus freely drew the parallel between the saints and the 
heathen deities, and he and others scourged the 
grossly materialistic form •which this worship often 
took. If we may believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for 
help in hiding their sin; merchants for a rich haul; 
gamblers for luck; and prostitutes for generous pa- 



CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION 29 

trons. Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact 
of a man who prayed for help in seducing his neigh- 
bor's wife, and similar instances of perverted piety 
are not wanting. The passion for the relics of the 
saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles. 
There appeared to be enough of the wood of the true 
cross, said Erasmus, to make a ship; there were ex- 
hibited five shin-bones of the ass on which Christ rode, 
whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several com- 
plete bits of skin saved from the circumcision of Jesus. 

Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate Temporal 
the claims of the popes to temporal power. The fj^J^^hurch 
church had become, in fact, an international state, with 
its monarch, its representative legislative assemblies, 
its laws and its code. It was. not a voluntary society, 
for if citizens were not l)orn into it they were baptized 
into it before they could exercise any choice. It kept 
prisons and passed sentence (virtually if not nomin- 
ally) of death; it treated with other governments as 
one power with another; it took principalities and 
kingdoms in fief. It was supported by involuntary 
contributions.^ 

The expanding world had burst the bands of the old 
church. It needed a new spiritual frame, and this 
frame was largely supplied by the Reformation. 
Prior to that revolution there had been several dis- 
tinct efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limita- 
tions imposed by the Catholic faith; this was done by 
the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by the patriots and 
by the humanists. 

§ 4. The Mystics 

One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy 
of salvation offered by the church was made by a 
school of mystics in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 

iMaitland: Canon Late in the Church of England, p. 100. 



30 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

tury. In this, however, there was protest neither 
against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldli- 
ness, for in these respects the mystics were extreme 
conservatives, more religious than the church herself. 
They were like soldiers who disregarded the orders of 
their superiors because they thought these orders in- 
terfered with their supreme duty of harassing the en- 
emy. With the humanists and other deserters they 
had no part nor lot; they sought to make the church 
more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to 
her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly 
joy and glory; they accepted her guidance without 
question; they rejoiced in her sacraments as aids to 
the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see what 
they considered merely the means of grace substituted 
for the end sought; they were insensibly repelled by 
finding a mechanical instead of a personal scheme of 
salvation, an almost commercial debit and credit of 
good works instead of a life of spontaneous and de- 
voted service. Feeling as few men have ever felt 
that the purpose and heart of religion is a union of 
the soul with God, they were shocked to see the inter- 
position of mediators between him and his creature, to 
find that instead of hungering for him men were try- 
ing to make the best bargain they could for their own 
eternal happiness. While rejecting nothing in the 
church they tried to transfigure everything. Accept- 
ing priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they 
declined to regard them as necessary intermediaries. 
The first of the great German mystics was Master 
Eckhart, a Dominican who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, 
at Paris, and at Cologne. The inquisitors of this last 
place summoned him before their court on the charge 
of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died. He 
was a Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the 
only true being, and that man was capable of reaching 



THE MYSTICS 31 

the absolute. Of all the mystics he was the most spec- 
ulative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and John 
Tauler were his disciples. Suso's ecstatic piety was Suso, 
of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and bent 
on winning personal salvation by the old means of se- 
vere self-torture and the constant practice of good ^^"!j5^, 
works. Tauler, a Dominican of Strassburg, belonged 
to a society known as The Friends of God. Of all his 
contemporaries he in religion was the most social and 
practical. His life was that of an evangelist, preach- 
ing to laymen in their own vernacular the gospel of a 
pure life and direct communion with God through the 
Bible and prayer. Like many other popular preachers 
he placed great emphasis on conversion, the turning 
(Kehr) from a bad to a good life. Simple faith is 
held to be better than knowledge or than the usual 
works of ecclesiastical piety. Tauler esteemed the 
holiest man he had ever seen one who had never heard 
five sermons in his life. All honest labor is called 
God's service, spinning and shoe-making the gifts of 
the Holy Spirit. Pure religion is to be '^drowned in 
God," '* intoxicated with God," '^ melted in the fire of 
his love." Transcending the common view of the 
average Christian that religion's one end was his o^vn 



^&^ V^X^XXOUXlAiX K^^^v iv.x^j3 



salvation, Tauler taught him that the love of God was 
greater than this. He tells of a woman ready to be 
damned for the glory of God — **and if such a person 
were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be 
the kingdom of God and eternal bliss in hell. ' ' 

One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a 
book written anonymously — ** spoken by the Almighty, 
Eternal God, through a wise, understanding, truly just 
man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic Order at 
Frankfort." The German Theology, as it was named The 
by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire abandon- rhZh!^B^ 
ment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter self- 



Theology 



32 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



1543 



Ruys- 

broeck, 

1293-1381 



Groote, 
1340-84 
Radewyn, 
1350-1400 



denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposi- 
tion of any external power, and equally without effort 
of her own, the soul shall find herself at one with the 
bridegroom. The immanence of God is taught; man's 
helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the 
reconciliation of the two is found only in the uncondi- 
tional surrender of man's will to G-od. "Put off thine 
own will and there will be no hell." 

Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an im- 
mense influence on Luther. They were later taken up 
by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by them to purify 
his church. The German Theology was first published 
by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the 
'Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met 
with a book from which he had learned so much of the 
nature of "God, Christ, man, and all things." But 
other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did not 
agree with him. Calvin detected secret and deadly 
poison in the author's pantheism, and in 1621 the 
Catholic Church placed his work on the Index. 

The Netherlands also produced a school of mystics, 
later in blooming than that of the Germans and greater 
in its direct influence. The earliest of them was John 
of Euysbroeck, a man of visions and ecstasies. He 
strove to make his life one long contemplation of the 
light and love of God. Two younger men, Gerard 
Groote and Florence Radewyn, socialized his gospel by 
founding the fellowship of the Brethren of the Com- 
mon Life. Though never an order sanctioned by the 
church, they taught celibacy and poverty, and devoted 
themselves to service of their fellows, chiefly in the 
capacity of teachers of boys. 

The fifteenth century's rising tide of devotion 
brought forth the most influential of the products of 
all the mystics, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas 
a Kempis. Written in a plaintive minor key of resig- 



THE MYSTICS 33 

nation and pessimism, it sots fortli with much artless Thomas a 
eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life ap- *^iTfJJ!|47i 
proach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, as- 
ceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and 
a diligent use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist 
are the means recommended to form the character of 
the perfect Christian. It was doubtless because all 
this was so perfect an expression of the medieval ideal 
that it found such wide and instant favor. There is no 
questioning of dogma, nor any speculation on the posi- 
tions of the church; all this is postulated with child- 
like simplicity. Moreover, the ideal of the church for 
the salvation of the individual, and the means sup- 
posed to secure that end, are adopted by a Kempis. 
He tacitly assumes that the imitator of Christ will be 
a monk, poor and celibate. His whole endeavor w^as 
to stimulate an enthusiasm for privation and a taste 
for things spiritual, and it was because in his earnest- 
ness and single-mindedness he so largely succeeded 
that his book was eagerly seized by the hands of thou- 
sands who desired and needed such stimulation and 
help. The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to 
the heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who 
saw in the love of God a good in itself transcending 
the happiness of one's own soul. He just wanted to 
be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with 
all his might. But this careful self-cultivation made 
his religion self -centered ; it was, compared even 
with the professions of the Protestants and of the 
Jesuits, personal and unsocial. 

Notwithstanding the profound differences between 
the Mystics and the Reformers, it is possible to see 
that at least in one respect the two movements were 
similar. It was exactly the same desire to get away 
from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme 
of salvation, that animated both. Tauler and Luther 



34 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

both deprecated good works and sought justification 
in faith only. Important as this is, it is possible to 
see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt 
from the church, and it is certain that they were far 
more than the Reformers fundamentally, even typ- 
Mysticism ically Catholic. It is true that mysticism is at heart 
always one, neither national nor confessional. But 
Catholicism offered so favorable a field for this de- 
velopment that mysticism may be considered as the ef- 
florescence of Catholic piety par excellence. Hardly 
any other expression of godliness as an individual, 
vital thing, was possible in medieval Christendom. 
There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and fif- 
teenth century mysticism which cannot be read far ear- 
lier in Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and 
Scotus. It could never be anything but a sporadic 
phenomenon because it was so intensely individual. 
While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could 
never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either 
social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it 
led not so much to solipsism as to a complete abnega- 
tion of the reason. Moreover it was slightly morbid, 
liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and emo- 
tion for a moment of vision and of union with God. 
How much more truly than he knew did Ruysbrpeck 
speak when he said that the soul, turned inward, could 
see the divine light, just as the eyeball, sufficiently 
pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind ! 

§ 5. Pee-keformees 

The men who, in later ages, claimed for their an- 
cestors a Protestantism older than the Augsburg Con- 
fession, referred its origins not to the mystics nor to 
the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the 
church as heretics. Though from the earliest age 
Christendom never lacked minds independent enough 



PRE-REFORMERS 35 

to differ from authority and characters strong enough 
to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in 
ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics 
that can really be considered as harbingers of the Re- 
formation were two sects dwelling in Southern France, Aibigenses 
tlie Aibigenses and the Waldenses. The former, first 
mot with in the eleventh century, derived part of their 
doctrines from oriental Manichaeism, part from prim- 
itive gnosticism. The latter were the followers of Waldenses 
Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 
1170, sold his goods and went among the poor preach- 
ing the gospel. Though quite distinct in origin both 
sects owed their success with the people to their at- 
tacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their use of 
the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of 
part of the sacramental system, and to their own ear- 
nest and ascetic morality. The story of their savage 
suppression, at the instigation of Pope Innocent III, 1209-29 
in the Albigensian crusade, is one of the darkest blots 
on the pages of history. A few remnants of them sur- 
vived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, har- 
ried from time to time by blood-thirsty pontiffs. In 
obedience to a summons of Innocent VIII King 1457 
Charles VIII of France massacred many of them. 

The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not 
so much the French heretics as two Englishmen, Occam 
and Wyclif. William of Occam, a Franciscan who Occam, 
taught at Oxford, was the most powerful scholastic '^' 
critic of the existing church. Untouched by the classic 
air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could 
be said against the church from her own medieval 
standpoint. He taught determinism; he maintained 
that the final seat of authority was the Scripture; he 
showed that such fundamental dogmas as the ex- 
istence of God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot 
be deduced by logic from the given premises ; he pro- 



36 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

posed a modification of the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion in the interests of reason, approaching closely in 
his ideas to the '^consubstantiation" of Luther. De- 
fining the church as the congregation of the faithful, 
he undermined her governmental powers. This, in 
fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead 
of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the 
judicial powers of the clergy be transferred to the civil 
government. Not only, in his opinion, should the civil 
ruler be totally independent of the pope, but even such 
matters as the regulation of marriage should be left 
to the common law. 

WycHf, X far stronger impression on his age was made by 

John Wyclif, the most significant of the Reformers 
before Luther. He, too, was an Oxford professor, a 
schoolman, and a patriot, but he was animated by a 
deeper religious feeling than was Occam. In 1361 he 
was master of Balliol College, where he lectured for 
many years on divinity. At the same time he held 
various benefices in turn, the last, the pastorate of 
Lutterworth in Leicestershire, from 1374 till his death. 
He became a reformer somewhat late in life owing to 
study of the Bible and of the bad condition of the Eng- 

i^*^** lish church. At the peace congress at Bruges as a 

commissioner to negotiate with papal ambassadors for 
the relief of crying abuses, he became disillusioned in 
his hope for help from that quarter. He then turned 
to the civil government, urging it to regain the usurped 
authority of the church. This plan, set forth in vol- 
uminous writings, in lectures at Oxford and in popu- 
lar sermons in London, soon brought him before the 

1377 tribunal of William Courtenay, Bishop of London, 

and, had he not been protected by the powerful prince, 
John of Lancaster, it might have gone hard with him. 
Five bulls launched against him by Gregory Xl from 
Eome only confirmed him in his course, for he ap- 



PRE-REFORMERS 37 

pealed from them to Parliament. Tried at Lambeth 
he was forbidden to preach or teach, and he therefore i378 
retired for the rest of his life to Lutterworth. He 
continued his literary labors, resulting in a vast host 
of pamphlets. 

Examining his writings we are struck by the fact 
that his program was far more religious and practi- 
cal than rational and speculative. Save transubstan- 
tiation, he scrupled at none of the mysteries of Ca- 
tholicism. It is also noticeable that social reform left 
him cold. "When the laborers rose under Wat Tyler, 1381 
Wyclif sided against them, as he also proposed that 
confiscated church property be given rather to the 
upper classes than to the poor. The real prii;iciples 
of Wyclif 's reforms were but two : to abolish the tem- 
poral power of the church, and to purge her of im- 
moral ministers. It w^as for this reason that he set 
up the authority of Scripture against that of tradi- 
tion; it was for this that he doubted the efficacy of 
sacraments administered by priests living in mortal 
sin; it was for this that he denied the necessity of 
auricular confession; it was for this that he would 
have placed the temporal power over the spiritual. 
The bulk of his writings, in both Latin and English, 
is fierce, measureless abuse of the clergy, particularly 
of prelates and of the pope. The head of Christendom 
is called Antichrist over and over again ; the bishops, 
priests and friars are said to have their lips full of 
lies and their hands of blood; to lead women astray; 
to live in idleness, luxury, simony and deceit; and to 
devour the English church. Marriage of the clergy is 
recommended. Indulgences are called a cursed rob- 
bery. 

To combat the enemies of true piety Wyclif relied 
on two agencies. The first was the Bible, which, with 
the assistance of friends, he Englished from the Vul 



38 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

gate. None of the later Keformers was more bent 
upon giving the Scriptures to the laity, and none at- 
tributed to it a higher degree of inspiration. As a 
second measure Wyclif trained ''poor priests" to be 
wandering evangelists spreading abroad the message 
of salvation among the populace. For a time they 
attained considerable success, notwithstanding the fact 
that the severe persecution to which they were sub- 

1401 jected caused all of Wyclif 's personal followers to 

recant. The passage of the act De Haeretico Combu- 
rendo was not, however, in vain, for in the fifteenth 
century a number of common men were found with 
sufficient resolution to die for their faith. It is prob- 
able that, as Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London 
wrote in 1523, the Lollards, as they were called, were 
the first to welcome Lutheranism into Britain. 

But if the seed produced but a moderate harvest in 
England it brought forth a hundred-fold in Bohemia. 

iqfio'idT; Wyclif 's writings, carried by Czech students from Ox- 
ford to Prague, were eagerly studied by some of the 
attendants at that university, the greatest of whom 
was John Huss. Having taken his bachelor's degree 
there in 1393, he had given instruction since 1398 and 
became the head of the university (Rector) for the 
year 1402. Almost the whole content of his lectures, 
as of his writings, was borrowed from Wyclif, from 
whom he copied not only his main ideas but long pas- 
sages verbatim and without specific acknowledgment. 
Professors and students of his own race supported 
him, but the Germans at the university took offence 
and a long struggle ensued, culminating in the seces- 
I sion of the Germans in a body in 1409 to found a new 
university at Leipsic. The quarrel, having started 
over a philosophic question, — Wyclif and Huss being 
realists and the Germans nominalists, — took a more 
serious turn when it came to a definition of the church 



PRE-REFORMERS 39 

and of the respective spheres of the civil and ecclesias- 
tical authorities. Defining the church as the body of 
the predestinate, and starting a campaign against in- 
dulgences, Huss soon fell under the ban of his supe- 
riors. After burning the bulls of John XXIII Huss 
withdrew from Prague. Summoned to the Council of 
Constance, he went thither, under safe-conduct from I4ii 
the Emperor Sigismund, and was immediately cast 
into a noisome dungeon. 

The council proceeded to consider the opinions of 1414 
Wyclif, condemning 260 of his errors and ordering his 
bones to be dug up and burnt, as was done twelve years 
later. Every effort was then made to get Huss to re- 
cant a list of propositions drawn up by the council 
and attributed to him. Some qf these charges were 
absurd, as that he was accused of calling himself the 
fourth person of the Trinity. Other opinions, like the 
denial of transubstantiation, he declared, and doubtless 
with truth, that he had never held. Much was made of 
his saying that he hoped his soul would be with the soul 
of Wyclif after death, and the emperor was alarmed 
by his argument that neither priest nor king living in 
mortal sin had a right to exercise his office. He was 
therefore condemned to the stake. 

His death ^yas perfect. His last letters are full of 
calm resolution, love to his friends, and forgiveness to 
his enemies. Haled to the cathedral where the coun- 
cil sat on July 6, 1-115, he was given one last chance 
to recant and save his life. Refusing, he was stripped 
of his vestments, and a paper cro^vn with three de- 
mons painted on it put on his head with the words, ~ 
**We commit thy soul to the devil"; he was then led 
to the jiublic square and burnt alive. Sigismund, 
threatened by the council, made no effort to redeem his 
safe-conduct, and in September the reverend fathers 
passed a decree that no safe-conduct to a heretic, and 



1431-6 



40 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

no pledge prejudicial to the Catholic faith, could be 
considered binding. Among the large concourse of 
divines not one voice was raised against this treacher- 
ous murder. 

Huss 's most prominent follower, Jerome of Prague, 
after recantation, returned to his former position and 
was burnt at Constance on May 30, 1416. A bull of 
1418 ordered the similar punishment of all heretics who 
maintained the positions of Wyclif, Huss, or Jerome 
of Prague. 

As, early as September a loud remonstrance against 
the treatment of their master was voiced by the Bo- 
hemian Diet. The more radical party, known as Xa- 
borites, rejected transubstantiation, worship of the 
saints, prayers for the dead, indulgences, auricular con- 
fession, and oaths. They allowed women to preach, 
demanded the use of the vernacular in divine service 
and the giving of the cup to the laity. A crusade was 
started against them, but they knew how to defend 
themselves. The Council of Basle was driven to ne- 
.gotiate v/ith them and ended by a compromise allow- 
ing the cup to the laity and some other reforms. Sub- 
sequent efforts to reduce them proved futile. Under 
King Podiebrad the Utraquists maintained their rights. 

Some Hussites, however, continued as a separate 
body, calling themselves Bohemian Brethren. First 
met with in 1457 they continue to the present day as 
■Moravians. They were subject to constant persecu- 
tion. In 1505 the Catholic official James Lilienstayn 
drew up an interesting list of their errors. It seems 
that their cardinal tenet was the supremacy of Scrip- 
ture, without gloss, tradition, or interpretation by the 
Fathers of the church. They rejected the primacy of 
the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could 
not be found in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy 
of masses for the dead and the validity of indulgences. 



NATIONALIZING THE CHURCHES 41- 

With much reason Wyclif and Huss have been 
called ''Reformers before the Reformation." Luther 
himself, not knowing the Englishman, recognized his 
deep indebtedness to the Bohemian. All of their pro- 
gram, and more, he carried through. His doctrine of 
justification by faith only, with its radical transforma- 
tion of the sacramental system, can'^.ot be found in 
these his predecessors, and this was a difference of 
vast importance. 

§ 6. Natioitalizing the Churches 

Inevitably, the growth of national sentiment spoken 
of above reacted on the religious institutions of Eu- 
rope. Indeed, it was here that the conflict of the inter- 
national, ecclesiastical state, and of the secular govern- 
ments became keenest. Both kings and people wished 
to control their ovm spiritual affairs as well as their 
temporalities. 

England traveled farthest on the road towards a na- The 
tional church. For three centuries she had been as- ^^*^^f'* 

Anglicana 

serting the rights of her government to direct spirit- 
ual as well as temporal matters. The Statute of Mort- 
main forbade the alienation of land from the jurisdie- 1279 
tion of the civil power by -appropriating it to religious 
persons. The withdrawing of land from the obliga- 
tion to pay taxes and feudal dues was thus checked* 
The encroachment of the civil power, both in England 
and France, was bitterly felt by the popes. Boniface 
VIII endeavored to stem the flood by the bull Clericis 1296 
laicos forbidding the taxation of clergy by any secular 
government, and the bull Unam Sanctam asserting the 1302 
universal monarchy of the Roman pontiff in the strong- 
est possible terms. But -these exorbitant claims were 
without effect. The Statute of Provisors forbade the JsgJ^"'* 
appointment to English benefices by the pope, and the 
Statute of Praemunire took away the right of Eng- 1393 



42 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

lisli subjects to appeal from the courts of their own 
country to Rome. The success of Wyclif 's movement 
was hirgely duo to his patriotism. Thouj;-h the signs 
of strife with the pope were fewer in the lit'tecnth cen- 
tury, there is no doubt that the national feeling per- 
sisted. 

The France manifested a spirit of liberty hardly less 

Church iierce than that of England. It was the French King 
Philip the Fair who lunniliated Boniface VIII so se- 
verely that he died of chagrin. During almost the 
whole of the fourteenth century the residence of a 
pope subservient to France at Avignon prevented any 
difficulties, but no sooner had the Council of Constance 
restored the head of the unified church to Eome than 
the old conflict again burst forth. The extreme claims 

1438 of the Galilean church were asserted in the law known 

as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the 
pope was left hardly any right of appointment, of 
jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France. The su- 
jiremaey of a council over the pope was explicitly 
asserted, as was the right of the civil magistrate to 
order ecclesiastical affairs in his dominions. When 
the pontitfs refused to recognize this almost schismat- 
ical position taken by France, the Pragmatic Sanction 
was further fortified by a law sentencing to death any 
person who should bring into the country a bull re- 
pugnant to it. Strenuous etforts of the papacy were 
directed to secure the repeal of this document, and in 
1461 Pius II induced Louis XI to revoke it in return 
for political concessions in Naples. This action, op- 
posed by the University and Parlement of Paris, 
proved so unpopular that two years later the Galilean 
liberties were reasserted in their full extent. 

Harmony was established between the interests of 

1516 the curia and of the French government by the com- 

promise known as the Concordat of Bologna. The 



NATIONALIZING THE CHURCHES 43 

concessions to the king wore so heavy that it was diffi- 
cult for Leo X to get his cardinals to consent to them. 
Almost the whole power of appointment, of jurisdic- 
tion, and of taxation was put into the royal hands, 
some stipulations being made against the conferring 
of benefices on immoral jjriests and against the frivol- 
ous imposition of ecclesiastical punishments. What 
the pope gained was the abandonment of the assertion 
made at Bourges of the supremacy of a general coun- 
cil. The Concordat was greeted by a storm of protest 
in France. The 'Sorbonne refused to recognize it and 
appealed at once to a general council. The king, how- 
ever, had the refractory members arrested and decreed 
the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1518. 

In Italy and Germany the growth of a national state 
was retarded by the fact that one was the seat of the ^^^^^ 
pope, the other of the emperor, each of them claim- 
ing a universal authority. Moreover, these two pow- 
ers were continually at odds. The long investiture 
strife, culminating in the triumph of Gregory Vll at 
Canossa and ending in the 'Concordat of Worms, could ^^^"^ 

• 1122 

not permanently settle the relations of the two. 
Whereas Aquinas and the Canon Law maintained the 
superiority of the pope, there were not lacking assert- 
ers of the imperial preeminence. William of Occam's 
argument to prove that the emperor might depose an 
heretical pope was taken up by Marsiglio of Padua, 
whose Defender of the Peace ranks among the ablest c. 1324 
of political pamphlets. In order to reduce the power 
of the pope, whom he called "the great dragon and 
old serpent," he advanced the civil government to a 
complete supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. He 
stated that the only authority in matters of faith was 
the Bible, with the necessary interpretation given it 
by a general council composed of both clerg)^ and lay- 
men; that the emperor had the right to convoke and 



44 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

direct this council and to punish all priests, prelates 
and the supreme pontiff; that the Canon Law had no 
validity; that no temporal punishment should be vis- 
ited on heresy save by the state, and no spiritual 
punishment be valid without the consent of the 
state. 
Germany AVith sucli a wcapon in their hands the emperors 

mig'ht have taken an even stronger stand than did the 
kings of England and France but for the lack of unity 
in their dominions. Germany was divided into a large 
number of practically independent states. It was in 
these and not in the empire as a whole that an ap- 
proach was made to a form of national church, such as 
was realized after Luther had broken the bondage of 
Rome. When Duke Eudolph IV of Austria in the 
fourteenth century stated that he intended to be pope, 
archbishop, archdeacon and dean in his owm land, when 
the dukes of Bavaria, Saxony and Cleves made similar 
boasts, they but put in a strong form the xerogram that 
they in part realized. The princes gradually acquired 
the right of patronage to church benefices, and they 
permitted no bulls to be published, no indulgences 
sold, without their permission. The Free Cities acted 
in much the same way. The authority of the German 
states over their own spiritualities was no innovation 
of the heresy of Wittenberg. 

For all Germany's internal division there was a cer- 
tain national consciousness, due to the common lan- 
guage. In no point were the people more agreed than 
in their opposition to the rule of the Italian Curia. 
At one time the monasteries of Cologne signed a com- 
pact to resist Gregory XI in a proposed levy of tithes, 
stating that, ''in consequence of the exactions by 
which the Papal Court burdens the clergy the Apostolic 
See has fallen into contempt and the Catholic faith 
in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled. ' * 



1382 



NATIONALIZING THE CHURCHES 45 

Again, a Knight of the Teutonic Order in Prussiai430 
wrote: ''Greed reigns supreme in the Roman Court, 
and day by day finds new devices and artifices for ex- 
torting money from Germany under pretext of eccle- 
siastical fees. Ilcnce arise much outcry, complaint 
and heart-burning. . . . Many questions about the 
papacy will be answered, or else obedience will ulti- 
mately be entirely renounced to escape from these out- 
rageous exactions of the Italians." 

The relief expected from the Council of Basle failed, 
and abuses were only made worse by a compact be- 
tween Frederick III and Nicholas V, known as the 
Concordat of Vienna. This treaty was by no means 1443 
comparable witli the English and French legislation, 
but was merely a division of the spoils between the 
two supreme rulers at the expense of the people. The 
power of appointment to high ecclesiastical positions 
was divided, annates were confirmed, and in general 
a considerable increase of the authority of the Curia 
was established. 

Protests began at once in the form of "Gravamina," 
or lists of grievances drawn up at each Diet as a peti- 
tion, and in part enacted into laws. In 1452 the Spir- 
itual Electors demanded that the emperor proceed 
with reform on the basis of the decrees of Constance. 
In 1457 the clergy refused to be taxed for a crusade. 
In 14G1 the princes appealed against the sale of in- 
dulgences. The Gravamina of this year were very 
bitter, complaining of the practice of usury by priests, 
of the pomp of the cardinals and of the pope's habit 
of giving promises of preferment to certain sees 
and then declaring the places vacant on the plea of 
having made a ''mental reservation" in favor of some 
one else. The Roman clergy were called in this bill 
of grievances "public fornicators, keepers of concu- 
bines, ruffians, pimps and sinners in various other re- 



46 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

spects." Drastic proposals of reform were defeated 
by the pope. 
Gravamina The Gravamina continued. Those of 1479 appealed 
against the Mendicant Orders and against the appoint- 
ment of foreigners. They clamored for a new coun- 
cil and for reform on the basis of the decrees of Basle ; 
they protested against judicial appeals to Rome, 
against the annates and against the crusade tax. It 
was stated that the papal appointees were rather fitted 
to be drivers of mules than pastors of souls. Such 
words found a reverberating echo among the people. 
The powerful pen of Gregory of Heimburg, sometimes 
called ''the lay Luther," roused his countrymen to a 
patriotic stand against the Italian usurpation. 

The Diet of 1502 resolved not to let money raised by 
indulgences leave Germany, but to use it against the 
Turks. Another long list of grievances relating to the 
tyranny and extortion of Rome was presented in 1510. 
The acts of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 
1518 are eloquent testimony to the state of popular 
feeling when Luther had just begun his career. To 
this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal Cajetan, 
requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. 
It was proposed that an impost of ten per cent, be 
laid on the incomes of the clergy and one of five per 
cent, on the rich laity. This was refused on account of 
the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and re- 
fused in language of the utmost violence. It was 
stated that the real enemy of Christianity was not the 
Turk but ''the hound of hell" in Rorde. Indulgences 
were branded as blood-letting. 

When such was the public opinion it is clear that 
Luther only touched a match to a heap of inflanunable 
material. The whole nationalist movement redounded 
to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches of 



THE HUMANISTS 47 

northern Europe are but the logical development of 
previous separatist tendencies. 

§ 7. The Humanists 

But the preparation for the great revolt was no less 
thorough on the intellectual than it was on the religi- 
ous and political sides. The revival of interest in 
classical antiquity, aptly known as the Renaissance, 
brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval 
standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The 
Renaissance stands in the same relationship to the 
Reformation that the so-called '* Enlightenment'* 
stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of 
the fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the 
eighteenth. 

The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as 
far as Dante we find, along with many modern ele- Dante, 
ments, such as the use of the vernacular, a completely 
medieval conception of the universe. His immortal 
poem is in one respect but a commentary on the 
Simima theologiae of Aquinas ; it is all about the other 
world. The younger contemporaries of the great 
Florentine began to be restless as the implications of Petrarch, 
the new spirit da^\^led on them. Petrarch lamented 
that literary culture was deemed incompatible with 
faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world as Boccaccio, 
Dante was a prophet of the next. Too simple-minded i^^^"^^ 
deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was instinctively 
opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting him- 
self to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, 
he took especial delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesi- 
astics, representing them as the quintessence of all im- 
purity and hypocrisy. The first story in his famous 
Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed 
as a saint, invoked as such and performing miracles 



48 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Valla, 
1406-56 



after death. The second story is of a Jew who was 
converted to Christianity by the wickedness of Rome, 
for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, 
could survive such desperate depravity as he saw 
there. The third tale, of the three rings, points the 
moral that no one can be certain what religion is the 
true one. The fourth narrative, like many others, 
turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere 
the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells 
how a priest deceived a woman by pretending that he 
was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was 
naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is 
too spontaneous to be called philosophic doubt; it is 
merely impiety. 

But such a sentiment could not long remain content 
with scoffing. The banner of pure rationalism, or 
rather of conscious classical skepticism, was raised by 
a circle of enthusiasts. The most brilliant of them, 
and one of the keenest critics that Europe has ever 
produced, was Lorenzo Valla, a native of Naples, and 
for some years holder of a benefice at Rome. Such 
was the trenchancy and temper of his weapons that 
much of what he advanced has stood the test of time. 
The Dona- The papal claim to temporal supremacy in the 
Constantine Western world rested largely on a spurious document 
kno"wn as the Donation of Constantine. In this the 
emperor is represented as withdrawing from Rome in 
order to leave it to the pope, to whom, in return for 
being cured of leprosy, he gives the whole Occident. 
An uncritical age had received this forgery for five 
or six centuries without question. Doubt had been 
cast on it by Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Peacock, 
but Valla demolished it. He showed that no historian 
had spoken of it; that there was no time at which it 
could have occurred; that it is contradicted by other 
contemporary acts; that the barbarous style contains 



THE HUMANISTS 49 

expressions of Greek, Hebrew, and German origin; 
that the testimony of numismatics is against it; and 
tliat the author knew nothing of the antiquities of 
Rome, into whose council he introduced satraps. 
Valla's work was so thoroughly done that the docu- 
ment, embodied as were its conclusions in the Canon 
Law, has never found a reputable -defender since. In 
time the critique had an immense effect. Ulricli von 
Hutten published it in 1517, and in the same year an 
English translation was made. In 1537 Luther turned 
it into German. 

And if the legality of the pope's rule w^as so slight, Valla 
what was its practical effect? According to Valla, it ^"^p'^^ 
was a ''barbarous, overbearing, tyrannical, priestly 
domination." ''What is it to you," he apostrophizes 
the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed? You have 
crushed it. If our temples have been pillaged? You 
have pillaged them. If our virgins and matrons have 
been violated? You have done it. If the city is in- 
nundated with the blood of citizens? You are guilty 
of it all." 

Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's Annota- 
idol Aristotle and the humanist's demigod Cicero. 11°"^^" 
More important were his Annotations on the Neiv Testament 
Testament, first published by Erasmus in 1505. The 
Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent 
defined to be, the authentic or official form of the 
Scriptures. Taking in hand three Latin and three 
Greek manuscripts. Valla had no difficulty in showing 
that they diifered from one another and that in some 
cases the Latin had no authority whatever in the 
Greek. He pointed out a number of mistranslations, 
some of them in passages vitally affecting the faith. 
In short he left no support standing for any theory 
of verbal inspiration. He further questioned, and 
successfully, the authorship of the Creed attributed 



50 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

to the Apostles, the authenticity of the writings of 
Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ 
to King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius. 
Attack on His attack on Christian ethics was still more funda- 
ethics mental. In his Dialogue on Free Will he tried with 

, ingenuity to reconcile the freedom of the will, denied 
by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of God, which 
he did not feel strong enough to dispute. In his work 
on The Monastic Life he denied all value to asceticism. 
Others had mocked the monks for not living up to their 
professions; he asserted that the ideal itself was mis- 
taken. But it is the treatise On Pleasure that goes the 
farthest. In form it is a dialogue on ethics ; one inter- 
locutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the 
Stoical, and the third the Christian standard. The 
sympathies of the author are plainly with the cham- 
pion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is the 
supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the 
prostitute is better than the nun, for the one makes 
men happy, the other is dedicated to a painful and 
shameful celibacy; that the law against adultery is a 
sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and 
should go naked; and that it is irrational to die for 
one's country or for any other ideal. ... It is note- 
worthy that the representative of the Christian stand- 
point accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness 
is the supreme good, only he places that happiness in 
the next life. 

Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in 
the half-century following his death. Masuccio in- 
dulged in the most obscene mockery of Catholic rites. 
Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the 
monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the 
Machia- faithful. Machiavclli assailed the papacy with great 
1530 ^^^^~ ferocity, attributing to it the corruption of Italian 
morals and the political disunion and weakness of 



THE HUMANISTS 51 

Italy, and advocating its annihilation. In place of 
Christianity, habitually spoken of as an exploded su- 
perstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the 
patriotic cults of antiquity. 

It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, 
that pagan expressions should color the writings of 
their courtiers. Poggio was a papal secretary, and so 
was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read Paul's 
epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity. In his 
exquisite search for classical equivalents for the rude 
phrases of the gospel, he referred, in a papal breve, 
to Christ as '''Minerva sprung from the head of Jove," 
and to the Holy Ghost as ''the breath of the celestial 
Zephyr." Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon 
of Inghirami heard by Erasmus at Eome on Good Fri- 
day 1509. Couched in the purest Ciceronian terms, 
while comparing the Saviour to Curtius, Cecrops, 
Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly 
devoted to an extravagant eulogy of the reigning 
pontiff, Julius II. 

But all the Italian humanists were not pagans. 
There arose at Florence, partly under the influence of 
the revival of Greek, partly under that of Savonarola, 
a group of earnest young men who sought to invigor- 
ate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of 
Plato. The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Picoddla 
Pico della Mirandola and Marsiglio Ficino, sought to jlj^l-ai '^' 
show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the 
Galilean were the same. Approaching the Bible in 
the simple literary way indicated by classical study, 
Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the 
New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was 
forced to adopt an ingenious but unsound allegorical 
interpretation. "Philosophy seeks the truth," he 
wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it." His 
extraordinary personal influence extended through 



52 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

lands beyond the Alps, even though it failed in ac- 
complishing the rehabilitation of Italian faith. 
Faber The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, 

fi45^"^^^' James Lefevre d'Etaples, was one of his disciples. 
1536 Traveling in Italy in 1492, after visiting Padua, Venice 

and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know Pico, 
and received from him a translation of Aristotle's 
Metaphysics made by Cardinal Bessarion. Return- 
ing to Paris he taught, at the College of Cardinal 
Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did 
not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most 
of the humanists, for he shrewdly suspected that what 
was offensive in the Stagyrite was due more to his 
scholastic translators and commentators than to him- 
self. He therefore labored to restore the true text, on 
which he wrote a number of treatises. It was with 
the same purpose that he turned next to the early 
Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the Are- 
opagite. But he did not find himself until he found 
the Bible. In 1509 he published the Quintuplex 
Psalterium, the first treatise on the Psalms in which 
the philological and personal interest was uppermost. 
Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been 
studied so much as the commentaries on it, a dry 
wilderness of arid and futile subtlety. Lefevre tried 
to see simply what the text said, and as it became more 
human it became, for him, more divine. His preface 
is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, in- 
deed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and 
spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, 
but this did not prevent a genuine eifort to read the 
words as they were written. Three years later he 
published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with 
commentary. Though he spoke of the apostle as 
a simple instrument of God, he yet did more to un- 
cover his personality than any of the previous com- 



THE HUMANISTS 53 

mentators. Half mystic as he was, Lefevre discovered 
in Paul the doctrine of justification by faith only. To 
I Corinthians viii, he wrote: *'It is almost profane to 
speak of the merit of works, especially towards God. 
. . . The opinion that we can be justified by works is 
an error for which the Jews are especially condemned. 
. . . Our only hope is in God's grace." Lefevre 's 
works opened up a new world to the theologians of the 
time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Ehenanus wrote that 
the richness of the Quintuplex Psalter made him poor. 
Thomas More said that English students owed him 
much. Luther used the two works of the Frenchman 
as the texts for his early lectures. From them he 
drew very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefevre 
who first suggested to him the formula of his famous 
** sola fide." 

The religious renaissance in England was led by a Coiet, 
disciple of Pico dolla Mirandola, John Colet, a man of 
remarkably pure life, and Dean of St. Paul's. Ho 
wrote, though he did not publish, some commentaries 
on the Pauline epistles and on the Mosaic account of 
creation. Though he knew no Greek, and was not an 
easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the 
humanists by his desire to return to the real sources 
of Christianity, and by his search for the historical 
sense of his texts. Though in some respects he was 
under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others 
his interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic. 
He exercised a considerable influence on Erasmus and 
on a few choice spirits of the time. 

The humanism of Germany centered in the universi- 
ties. At the close of the fifteenth century new courses 
in the Latin classics, in Greek and in Hebrew, began 
to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and 
philosophy. At every academy there sprang up a 
circle of ** poets," as they called themselves, often of 



54 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



Mutian, 
1471-1526 



Reuchlin, 
1455-1522 



1506 



lax morals and indifferent to religion, but earnest in 
their championship of culture. Nor were these circles 
confined entirely to the seats of learning. Many a city 
had its own literary society, one of the most famous 
being that of Nuremberg. Conrad Mutianus Eufus 
drew to Gotha, where he held a canonry, a group of 
disciples, to whom he imparted the Neo-Platonism he 
had imbibed in Italy. Disregarding revelation, he 
taught that all religions were essentially the same. 
*^I esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those 
of priests," he wrote. 

What Lefevre and Colet had done for the New 
Testament, John Reuchlin did for the Old. After 
studying in France and Italy, where he learned to 
know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and 
devoted his life to the study of Hebrew. His De Rudi- 
mentis Ilebraicis, a grammar and dictionary of this 
language, performed a great service for scholarship. 
In the late Jewish work, the Cabbala, he believed he 
had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The ex- 
travagance of his interpretations of Scriptual pas- 
sages, based on this, not only rendered much of his 
work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of trou- 
ble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, 
in a series of pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden 
to practise usury, should be compelled to hear sermons 
and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to be burnt, 
except the Old Testament. When Reuchlin 's aid in 
this pious project was requested it was refused in a 
memorial dated October 6, 1510, pointing out the great 
value of much Hebrew literature. The Dominicans of 
Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstra- 
ten, made this the ground for a charge of heresy. 
The case was appealed to Rome, and the trial, lasting 
six years, excited the interest of all Europe. In Ger- 
many it was argued with much heat in a host of pam- 



THE HUMANISTS 55 

plilets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side 
of the inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, 
Ortuin Gratius of Cologne, taking the part of the 
scholar. The latter received many warm expressions 
of admiration and support from the loading writers of 
the time, and published them in two volumes, the first 
in 1514, under the title Letters of Eminent Men. It 
was this that suggested to the humanist, Crotus Eu- 
boanus, the title of his satire published anonymously, 
TJie Letters of Obscure Men. In form it is a series of 
epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gra- Epistolae 
tius. Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they ex- rumViro- 
press their admiration for his attack on Eeuchlin and ^"■"^ 
the cause of learning, gossip about their drinking- 
bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance 
and gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether 
it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, and whether the 
worms eaten with beans and cheese should be con- 
sidered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what 
stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat 
and therefore prohibited on Fridays. The satire, 
coarse as it was biting, failed to win the applause of 
the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter from 
the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding 
to contempt for the church. The first book of these 
Letters, published in 1515, was followed two years 
later by a second, even more caustic than the first. 
This supplement, also published without the writer's 
name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten. 

This brilliant and passionate writer devoted the Hutten, 

1488— l'i2S 

greater part of his life to war with Rome. His motive 
was not religious, but patriotic. He longed to see his 
country strong and united, and free from the galling 
oppression of the ultramontane yoke. He published 
Valla's Donation of Constantine, and wrote epigrams 
on the popes. His dialogue Fever the First is a vitri- 



56 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

olic attack on the priests. His Vadiscus or the Roman 
1520 Trinity scourges the vices of the curia where three 

things are sold: Christ, places and women. When he 
first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of 
- monks, and only hoped they would all destroy one an- 
other. But by 1519 he saw in the Keformer the most 
powerful of allies against the common foe, and he ac- 
cordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal. His 
letters at this time breathe out fire and slaughter 
against the Romanists if anything should happen to 
Luther. In 1523, he supported his friend Francis von 
Sickingen, in the attempt to assert by force of arms the 
rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights. 
When this was defeated, Hutten, suffering from a ter- 
rible disease, wandered to Switzerland, Avhere he died, 
a lonely and broken exile. His epitaph shall be his 
own lofty poem: 

I have fought my fight with courage, 
Nor have I aught to rue, 
For, though I lost the battle, 
The world knows, I was true ! 

Erasmus, The most cosmopolitan, as v/ell as the greatest, of 

1466-1536 ^11 ^j^^ Christian humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus 
of Rotterdam. Though an illegitimate child, he was 
well educated and thoroughly grounded in the classics 
at the famous school of Deventer. At the age of 
twenty he was persuaded, somewhat against his will, 
to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at Steyn. 
Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was 
1499-1509 enabled to continue his studies at Paris. For the 
next ten years he Avandered to England, to various 
places in Northern France and Flanders, and Italy, 
learning to know many of the intellectual leaders of 
the time. From 1509-14 he was in England, part of 
the time lecturing at Cambridge. He then spent some 



THE HU^IANISTS 57 

years at Louvain, seven years at Basic and six years 
at Freiburg in the Breisgau, returning to Basle for the 
last year of his life. 

Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant inter- 
est was classical literature. Under the influence of 
Colet and of a French Franciscan, John Vitrier, he 
turned his attention to liberalizing religion. His first 
devotional work, The Hmulhooh of the Christian Enchiridion 
Knight, perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, ^rl!^^- • 
as opposed to formal, Christianity. It all turns upon i503 
the distinction between the inner and the outer man, 
the moral and the sensual. True service of Christ is 
purity of heart and love, not the invocation of saints, 
fasting and indulgences. 

In The Praise of Folly Erasmus mildly rebukes the i^^^ 
foibles of men. There never was kindlier satire, free 
from the savage scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from 
the didactic scolding of Sebastian Brant, whose Ship 
of Foots was one of the author 's models. Folly is made 1494 
quite amiable, the source not only of some things that 
are amiss but also of much harmless enjo^Tiient. The 
besetting silliness of every class is -exposed : of the man 
of pleasure, of the man of business, of women and of 
husbands, of the writer and of the pedant. Though 
not unduly emphasized, the folly of current super- 
stitions is held up to ridicule. Some there are who 
have turned the saints into pagan gods; some who 
have measured purgatory into years and days and 
clieat themselves with indulgences against it; some 
theologians who spend all their time discussing such 
absurdities as whether God could have redeemed men 
in the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a squash or a 
stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity. 

In following up his plan for the restoration of a 
simpler Christianity, Erasmus rightly thought that a 
return from the barren subtleties of the schoolmen to 



of Christ 



58 THE OLD AND THE NEW 

the primitive sources was essential. He wished to 
reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, un- 
dogmatic philosophy of life. His attitude towards 
dogma was to admit it and to ignore it. Scientific en- 
lightenment he Avelcomcd more than did either the 
Catholics or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on 
the Mount survived, Christianity had nothing to fear. 
In like manner, while he did not attack the cult and 
ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on it. 
''If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites 
superstitious," he seemed to say, ''what does it mat- 
ter? Let us emphasize the ethical and spiritual con- 
tent of Christ's message, for if we seek his kingdom, 
all else needful shall be added unto us." His favorite 
Philosophy name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ," 
and it is thus that he persuasively expounds it in a 
note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30 : 

Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden 
light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what 
he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save 
love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that 
charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything ac- 
cording to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords 
better with the nature of man than the philosophy of 
Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to 
fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . . How pure, 
how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us ! How 
close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles, 
or apostolic men. The church, divided and tormented by 
discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of 
which some can be omitted without prejudice to the 
faith. . . . There are many opinions from which impiety 
may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic 
doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction 
of the persons of the Godhead. . . . The sacraments 
themselves were instituted for the salvation of men, but 
we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppres- 
sion of the humble. . . . What rules, what superstitions 
we have about vestments! How many are judged as to 



THE HUMANISTS 59 

their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent in 
themselves, which change with the fashion and of which 
Christ never spoke ! . . . How many fasts are instituted ! 
And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on 
pain of damnation. . . . "What shall we say about vows 
. . . about the^uthority of the pope, the abuse of absolu- 
tions, dispensations,, remissions of penalty, law-suits, in 
which there is much that a truly good man cannot see 
without a groan? The priests themselves prefer to 
study Aristotle than to ply their ministry. The gospel 
is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are 
monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often 
the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for 
their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let 
Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they 
would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant 
tyranny by human decrees ! 

In the Familiar Colloquies, first published in 1518 Colloquies 
and often enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus 
brought out his religious ideas most sharply. Enor- 
mous as were the sales and influence of his other chief 
writings, they were probably less than those of this 
work, intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. 
The first conversations are, indeed, nothing more than 
school-boy exercises, but the later ones are short 
stories penned w'ith consummate art. Erasmus is 
almost the only man Avho, since the fall of Eome, has 
succeeded in writing a really exquisite Latin. But his 
supreme gift was his dry wit, the subtle faculty of ex- 
posing an object, apparently by a simple matter-of-fact 
narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in the Col- 
loquies, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's 
shrine at Canterbury, the bloody bones and the hand- 
kerchief covered with the saint's rheum offered to be 
kissed — all without a disapproving word and yet in 
such a way that when the reader has finished it he 
wonders how anything so silly could ever have existed. 
Thus again he strips the worship of Mary, and all the 



6a THE OLD AND THE NEW 

stupid and wrong projects she is asked to abet. In 
the conversation called The Shipwreck, the people pray 
to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan 
times, only it is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They 
offer mountains of wax candles to the saints to pre- 
serve them, although one man confides to his neighbor 
in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not 
pay one penny taper on his vow. Again, in the Col- 
loquy on the New Testament, a young man is asked 
what he has done for Christ. He replies : 

A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testa- 
ment of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called 
on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left 
hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so 
sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a 
mere jelly. Wliat do you*say to that? Isn't that main- 
taining the gospel ? And then, by way of absolution for 
his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a 
folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding 
whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the 
Son and of the Holy Ghost. 

'^That,^' replies his friend, ''was truly evangelic; 
defending the gospel by the gospel. But really it is 
time you were turning from a brute beast into a man." 

So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest 
Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of 
his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to at- 
tack anything. Where Luther battered down, he 
undermined. Even when he argued against an opin- 
ion he called his polemic a "Conversation" — for that 
is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice 
of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double nega- 
tives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt 
anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" {siih- 
dubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but 
he confessed that he produced "something more like 
Latin than the average" (paulo latinius). Did he 



THE HU:MANISTS 61 

like anything? If so, he only admitted — except when 
he was addressing his patrons — "that he was not alto- 
gether averse to it." But all at once from these 
feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, 
comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. 
Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been 
quoted in practically every history of the subject since, 
and will be quoted as often again. 

But it was not a few perfect phrases that made hira His wit 
the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never 
failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. 
When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing 
him over the chapter house and w^as boasting of the 
rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who 
had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the 
humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, 
with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed hon- 
ored to be in a religious company so noble that even 
Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. 
The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected some- 
thing personal ; but he never forgot the salutary lesson 
so delicately conveyed. 

Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared *'thc tu- 
mult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 
1517 — though he sometimes retouched his letters on 
publishing them — he foresaw. *'In this part of the 
world," he wrote, **I am afraid that a great revolu- 
tion is impending." It was already knocking at the 
door ! 



CHAPTER II 
GERMANY 

§ 1. The Leader 

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no 
great historical movement is caused by the personality, 
however potent, of a single individual. The men who 
take the helm at crises are those who but express in 
themselves what the masses of their followers feel. 
The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no 
really great man at hand, the people will invent one, 
endowing the best of the small men with the prestige 
of power, and embodying in his person the cause for 
which they strive. But a really strong personality to 
some extent guides the course of events by which he is 
carried along. Such a man was Luther. Few have 
ever alike represented and dominated an age as did 
he. His heart was the most passionately earnest, his 
will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious 
of his time ; above all he had the gift of popular speech 
to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. 
If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found 
public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; 
all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble 
thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most 
powerful reagent possible. 

On that October day when Columbus discovered the 
new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sit- 
ting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though 
both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin 
primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, 
and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by 

62 



THE LEADER 63 

brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he 
returned home he found his mother bending under a 
load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both 
she and his father were severe with the children, whip- 
ping them for slight faults until the blood came. 
Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they 
meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice 
and determination showm by the father, a worker in 
the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose 
to modest comfort, the career of the son would have 
been impossible. 

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life 
was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons 
lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good 
mother and threatened to make her children cry them- 
selves to death. God and Christ were conceived as 
stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into 
hell. ''They painted Christ," says Luther — and such 
pictures can still be seen in old churches — ''sitting on 
a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on 
cither side as intercessors against his frightful 
wrath. '^ 

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a 
charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where 
he spent three years in study. He contributed to his 
support by the then recognized means of begging, 
and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. 
In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous uni- 
versity of Erfurt. The curriculum here consisted of Erfurt 
logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by 
arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some 
natural science, studied not by the experimental 
method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his 
medieval commentators, and there were also a few 
courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in 
their later imitators. Banking among the better 



64 GERMANY 

scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 
and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began 
the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and 
good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he 
mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He 
was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a ** phi- 
losopher"; in disputations he was made ''an honorary 
umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune 
and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on Sep- 
tember 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly 
as possible." 

For the sudden change that came over his life at the 
age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been 
offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do 
not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as 
a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a 
friend well substantiated. As he was returning to 
Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a ter- 
rific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination 
saw a divine warning to forsake the "world." In a 
fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, 
though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 
17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian 
friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the 
irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. 
In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 
1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, 
and there saw much of the splendour and also of the 
corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having 
started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently 
founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he 
1511 returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg 

to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. 

During his first ten years in the cloister he under- 
went a profound experience. He started with the hor- 
rible and torturing idea that he was doomed to hell. 



THE LEADER 65 

''What can I do," he kept asking, ''to win a gracious 
God?" The answer given him by his teachers was 
that a man must work out his o^\ti salvation, not en- 
tirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments 
of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, 
and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the 
asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther 
took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, 
prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. 
But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could 
not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was 
helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Au- 
gustine that virtue without grace is but a specious 
vice ; that God damns and saves utterl}^ without regard 
to man 's work. He read in Tauler and the other mys- 
tics that the only true salvation is union with God, and 
that if a man were willing to be damned for God's 
glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in 
Lefevre d'fitaplcs that a man is not saved by doing 
good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross. 

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles 
to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The 
just shall live by his faith." All at once, so forcibly justifica- 
that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the ^'«"^y 

^ . laith only 

thought dawmed upon him that whereas man was im- 
potent to do or be good, God was able freely to make 
him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple aban- 
donment to his will was the only way of salvation ; not 
by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanc- 
tified. The thought, though by no means new in Chris- 
tianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of 
the religious revolution. In it was contained the total 
repudiation of tlie medieval ecclesiastical system of 
salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the 
cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; 
the question which called it forth outworn. But to the 



m GERMANY 

sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social 
reform is now; the church was everywhere with her 
claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their 
souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her 
claims, and probably nothing could have done it so 
thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only. 

The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He 
started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the uni- 
versity of the dross of Aristotle. Soon he was called 
upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of 
the ''good works" recommended by the church, the 
purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was 
elected, through political influence and at an early age, 
to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, 
this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy 
of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the 
uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a 
huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand 
dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the 
young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. 
To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X 
declared an indulgence. In order to get as large a 
profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent 
Tetzel an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. This 

man went around the country proclaiming that as soon 
as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead 
relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a 
papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission 
of sins and the grace of God. 

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Sax- 
ony, but they came very near it, and many of the peo- 
ple of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. 
Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be 
the deception of the poor people in being taught to 
rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively 
faith. He accordingly called their value in question 



THE LEADER 67 

in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, The Ninety- 
which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on ^H-^ ^^^^' 
October 31, 1517. lie pointed out that the doctrine 
of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard 
to the freeing of souls from purgatory ; that contrition 
was the only gate to God's pardon ; tliat works of char- 
ity were better than buying of indulgences, and that 
the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely 
scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the 
simple. Tn nil this he did not directly deny the whole 
value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a mini- 
mum. 

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around 
to friends in other cities. They were at once put into 
German, and applauded to the echo by the whole na- 
tion. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion 
of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypoc- 
risy. Jt[\ welcomed the attack on the ''holy trade," as 
its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had 
to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any 
sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X 
directed the general of the Augustinians to make his Februarys, 
presumptuous brother recant. The matter was ac- 
cordingly brought up at the general chapter of the 
Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was pres- 
ent, was asked to retract, and refused. On the con- 
trary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace 
and a defence of the Theses stating his points more 
strongl}^ than before. 

The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The 
Diet which met at Augsburg in the sunmier of 1518 
was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, 
Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, 
who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the 
Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther 
was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the 



6S GERMANY 

Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, 
and, in order to expedite matters, the latter changed 
the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at 
Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to 
seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture 
Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, 
Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom 
an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with 
this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Caje- 
October 12- tan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his state- 

14 1518 

ments on indulgences, and refused. A few days later 
Luther drew up an appeal ''from the pope badly in- 
formed to the pope to be better informed,'^ and in the 
following month appealed again from the pope to a 
future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X, 
in the bull Cum postquam, authoritatively defined the 
doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the posi- 
tion of Luther. 

The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to 
Germany a special agent, the Saxon Charles von Mil- 
titz, with instructions either to cajole the heretic into 
retraction or the Elector into surrendering him, Li 
neither of these attempts was he successful. At an in- 
{t?Q*^' terview with Luther the utmost he could do w^as to 

XOX7 

secure a general statement that the accused man would 
abide by the decision of the Holy See, and a promise 
to keep quiet as long as his opponents did the same. 

Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the 
champions of the church could not let the heretic rest 
for a moment. The whole affair was given a wider 
publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the same 
time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position 
than he had yet reached, by the attack of a theologian 
of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When he assailed the Theses 
on the ground that they seriously impaired the author- 
ity of the Roman see, Luther retorted: 



THE LEADER 69 

The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all 
other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal de- 
crees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to 
the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred 
years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all 
councils, the Nicene. 

A debate on this and other propositions between TheUipzig 
Eck on the one side and Luther and his colleague ^^^g^*' 
Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig in the days 
from June 27 to July 16, 1519. The climax of the 
argument on the power of popes and councils came 
when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring to show that Luther's 
opinions were identical with those of Huss, forced from 
his opponent the bold declaration that "among the 
opinions of John Huss and the Bohemians many are 
certainly most Christian and evangelic, and cannot be 
condemned by the universal church.'^ The words sent 
a thrill through the audience and throughout Christen- 
dom. Eck could only reply: *'If you believe that a 
general council, legitimately convoked, can err, you 
are to me a heathen and a publican." Reconciliation 
was indeed no longer possible. When Luther had pro- 
tested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a 
loyal son of the church. Now at last he was forced 
to raise the standard of revolt, at least against Rome, 
the recognized head of the church. He had begun by 
appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from 
the pope to a universal council; now he declared that 
a great council had erred, and that he would not abide 
by its decision. The issue was a clear one, though 
hardly recognized as such by himself, between the re- 
ligion of authority and the right of private judgment. 

His opposition to the papacy developed with ex- 
traordinary rapidity. His study of the Canon Law 
made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the pope as 
cither Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle. He ap- 



70 GERMANY 

plauded Melanchthon, a brilliant young man called to 
teach at Wittenberg in 1518, for denying transubstan- 
tiation. He declared that the cup should never have 
been withheld from the laity, and that the mass con- 
sidered as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomina- 
tion. His eyes were opened to the iniquities of Rome 
by Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine, 
published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519. After read- 
ing it he wrote : 

Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at 
Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God that such 
unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but pre- 
vailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated 
into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might 
be wanting) that they became as articles of faith. 

Like German troops Luther was best in taking the 
-offensive. These early years when he was standing 
almost alone and attacking one abuse after another, 
were the finest of his whole career. Later, when he 
came to reconstruct a church, he modified or withdrew 
much of what he had at first put forward, and re- 
introduced a large portion of the medieval religiosity 
which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. 
The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he 
ever attained. It was then that he produced, with 
marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled 
by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive 
power of their attack on existing institutions and in 
the popular force of their language. 
To the His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in 

Christian j^jg Address to the Christian Nobility of the German 
1520 ' Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate. 
In this he asserts the right of the civil power to reform 
the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise 
this right. The priests, says he, defend themselves 
against all outside interference by three ** walls," of 



THE LEADER 71 

which the first is the claim that the church is superior 
to the state, in case the civil authority presses them; 
the second, the assertion, if one would correct them 
by the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope ; 
the third, if they are threatened with a general council, 
the contention that no one can convoke such a council 
save the pope. Luther demolishes these walls with 
words of vast import. First, he denies any distinc- 
tion between the spiritual and temporal estates. 
Every baptized Christian, he asserts, is a priest, and 
in this saying he struck a mortal blow at the great 
hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up 
l)y the Middle Ages. The second wall is still frailer 
than the first, says the writer, for anyone can see that 
in spite of the priests' claims to be masters of the 
Bible they never learn one word of it their whole life 
long. The third wall falls of itself, for the Bible 
plainly commands everyone to punish and correct any 
wrong-doer, no matter what his station. 

After this introduction Luther proposes measures of Reform 
reform equally drastic and comprehensive. The first "^^^^"'^ 
twelve articles are devoted to the pope, the annates, 
the appointment of foreigners to German benefices, the 
appeal of cases to Eome, the asserted authority of the 
papacy over bishops, the emperor, and other rulers. 
All these abuses, as well as jubilees and pilgrimages 
to Eome should be simply forbidden by the civil gov- 
ernment. The next three articles deal with sacerdotal 
celibacy, recommending that priests be allowed to 
marry, and calling for the suppression of many of the 
cloisters. It is further urged that foundations for 
masses and for the support of idle priests be abol- 
ished, that various vexatious provisions of the Canon 
Law be repealed, and that begging on any pretext be 
prohibited. The twenty-fourth article deals with the 
Bohemian schism, saying that Huss was wrongly 



72 GEEMANY 

burned, and calling for union mtli the Hussites who 
deny transubstantiation and demand the cup for the 
laity. Next, the writer takes up the reform of educa- 
tion in the interests of a more biblical religion. Fi- 
nally, he urges that sumptuary laws be passed, that a 
bridle be put in the mouth of the great monopolists and 
usurers, and that brothels be no longer tolerated. 

Of all the writer's works this probably had the 
greatest and most immediate influence. Some, indeed, 
were offended by the violence of the language, de- 
fended by Luther from the example of the Bible and by 
the necessity of rousing people to the enormities he 
attacked. But most hailed it as a ''trumpet-blast" 
calling the nation to arms. Four thousand copies were 
sold in a few days, and a second edition was called for 
within a month. Voicing ideas that had been long, 
though vaguely, current, it convinced almost all of the 
need of a reformation. According to their sympathies 
men declared that the devil or the Holy Ghost spoke 
through Luther. 
Ionian Q^ ■ Though Icss popular both in form and subject. The 
tJOTty,i520 Bahylonian Captivity of the Church was not less im- 
portant than the Address to the German Nohility. It 
was a mortal blow at the sacramental system of the 
church. In judging it we must again summon the aid 
of our historical imagination. In the sixteenth cen- 
tury dogmas not only seemed but were matters of 
supreme importance. It was just by her sacramental 
system, by her claim to give the believer eternal life 
and salvation through her rites, that the church had 
imposed her yoke on men. As long as that belief re- 
mained intact progress in thought, in freedom of con- 
science, in reform, remained difficult. And here, as is 
frequently the case, the most effective arguments were 
not those which seem to us logically the strongest. 
Luther made no appeal to reason as such. He ap- 



THE LEADER 73 

pealed to the Bible, recognized by all Christians as an 
authority, and showed how far the practice of the 
church had degenerated from her standard. In the 
first place he reduced the number of sacraments, deny- Sacrament* 
ing that name to matrimony, orders, extreme unction 
and confirmation. In attacking orders he demolished 
the priestly ideal and authority. In reducing mar- 
riage to a civil contract he took a long step towards the 
secularization of life. Penance he considered a sacra- 
ment in a certain sense, though not in the strict one, 
and he showed that it had been turned by the church 
from its original significance of '* repentance" ^ to that 
of sacramental penance, in which no faith was required 
but merely an automatic act. Baptism and the eu- 
charist he considered the only true sacraments, and 
he seriously criticized the prevalent doctrine of the 
latter. He denied that the mass is a sacrifice or a 
''good work" pleasing to God and therefore beneficial 
to the soul either of living or of dead. He denied that 
the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body 
and blood of Jesus, though he held that the body and 
blood are really present with the elements. He de- 
manded that the cup be given to the laity. 

The whole trend of Luther's thought at this time was 
to oppose the Catholic theory of a mechanical distribu- 
tion of grace and salvation (the so-called opus opera- 
tum) by means of the sacraments, and to substitute for 
it an individual conception of religion in which faith 
only should be necessary. How far he carried this 
idea may be seen in his Sermon on the New Testament, 
that is on the Holy Mass,^ published in the same year 
as the pamphlets just analysed. In it he makes the 
essence of the sacrament forgiveness, and the vehicle 
of this forgiveness the word of God apprehended by 

1 In Latin penitentia means both penance and repentance. 

2 Cf. jSIatthew, xxvi, 28. 



74 GERMANY 

faith, not the actual participation in the sacred bread 
and wine. Had he always been true to this conception 
he would have left no place for sacrament or priest at 
all. But in later years he grew more conservative, 
until, under slightly different names, almost the old 
medieval ideas of church and religion were again 
established, and, as Milton later expressed it, ''New 
presbyter was but old priest writ large." 

§ 2. The Revolution 
Germany Although the Germans had arrived, by the end of the 

[fifteenth century, at a high degree of national self- 
consciousness, they had not, like the French and Eng- 
lish, succeeded in forming a corresponding political 
unity. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Na- 
tion, though continuing to assert the vast claims of the 
Roman world-state, was in fact but a loose confederacy 
of many and very diverse territories. On a map 
drawn to the scale 1 ; 6,000,000 nearly a hundred sep- 
arate political entities can be counted within the limits 
of the Empire and there were many others too small to 
appear. The rulers of seven of these territories 
elected the emperor; they were the three spiritual 
princes, the Archbishops of Mayence, Treves and Co- 
logne, the three German temporal princes, the Electors 
of the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg, 
and in addition the King of Bohemia, who, save for 
purposes of the imperial choice, did not count as a 
member of the Germanic body. Besides these there 
were some powerful dukedoms, like Austria and Ba- 
varia, and numerous smaller bishoprics and counties. 
There were also many free cities, like Augsburg and 
Nuremberg, small aristocratic republics. Finally there 
was a large body of ''free knights" or barons, whose 
tiny fiefs amounted often to no more than a castle and 
a few acres, but who owned no feudal superior save 



THE REVOLUTION 75 

the emperor. The unity of the Empire was expressed .. 
not only in the person of the emperor, but in the Diet 
which met at different places at frequent intervals. 
Its authorit}^, though on the whole increasing, was 
small. 

With no imperial system of taxation, no professional 
army and no centralized administration, the real power 
of the emperor dwindled. Such as it was he derived it 
from the fact that he was always elected from one of 
the great houses. Since 1438 the Ilapsburgs, Arch- 
dukes of Austria, had held the imperial office. Since 
1495 there was also an imperial supreme court of arbi- 1495 
tration. The first imperial tax was levied in 1422 to 
equip a force against the Hussites. In the fifteenth 
centuiy also the rudiments of a central administration 
were laid in the division of the realm into ten ''cir- 
cles," and the levy of a small number of soldiers. 
And yet, at the time of the Reformation, the Empire 
was little better than a state in dissolution through 
the centrifugal forces of feudalism. 

So little was the Empire an individual unit that the 
policy of her rulers themselves was not imperial. 
The statesmanship of Maximilian was something 
smaller than national ; it was that of his Archduchy of 
Austria. The p<^licy of his successor, on the other 
hand, was determin(M by something larger than Ger- 
many, the consideration of the Spanish and Burgundian 
states that he also ruled. Maximilian tried in every Maximilian 
way to aggrandize his pelcsonal power, not that of the I'Jf^^ 
German nation. The Diet\of Worms of 1495 tried to 
remodel the constitution. It proclaimed a perpetual 
public peace, provided that those who broke it should 
be outlawed, and placed the duty of executing the ban 
upon all territories within ninety miles of the offender. 
It also passed a bill for taxation, called the ''common 
penny," which combined features of a poll tax, an in- 



76 GERMANY 

come tax and a property tax. The difficulty of collect- 
ing it was great; Maximilian himself as a territorial 
prince tried to evade it instead of setting his subjects 
the good example of paying it. He probably derived 
no more than the trifling sum of 50,000-100,000 gulden 
from it annually. The Diet also revived the Supreme 
Court and gave it a permanent home at Frankf ort-on- 
the-Main. Feeble efforts to follow up this beginning 
of reform were made in subsequent Diets, but they 
failed owing to the insuperable jealousies of the 
princes and because the party of national unity lost 
the sympathy of the common people, to whom alone 
they could look for support. 

Maximilian's external policy, though adventurous 
and unstable, was somewhat more successful. His 
only principle was to grasp whatever opportunity 
seemed to offer. Thus at one tjme he seriously pro- 
posed to have himself elected pope. His marriage 
with Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, added 
to the estates of his house Burgundy — the land com- 
prising what is now Belgium, Luxemburg, most of 
Holland and large portions of north-eastern France. 
On the death of Mary, in 1482, Maximilian had much 
trouble in getting himself acknowledged as regent of 
her lands for their son Philip the Handsome. A part 
of the domain he also lost in a war with France. This 
was more than m^ade up, however, by the brilliant match 
he made for Philip in securing for him the hand of 
Mad Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand 
and Isabella of Spain. This marriage produced two 
sons, Charles and Ferdinand. The deaths of Isabella 
(1504), of Philip (1506) and of Ferdinand of Aragon 
Charles V, (1516) left Charlcs at the age of sixteen the ruler of 
Burgundy and of Spain with its immense dependencies 
in Italy and in America. From this time forth the 
policy of Maximilian concentrated in the effort to 



1500-58 



THE REVOLUTION 77 

secure the succession of his eldest grandson to the 
imperial throne. 

When Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, there 
were several candidates for election. So little was the 
office considered national that the kings of Franco and 
England entered the lists, and the former, Francis I, 
actually at one time secured the promise of votes from 
the majority of electors. Pope Leo made explicit en- 
gagements to both Charles and Francis to support 
their claims, and at the same time instructed his legate 
to labor for the choice of a German prince, either 
Frederic of Saxony, if he would in return give up 
Luther, or else Joachim of Brandenburg. But at no 
time was the election seriously in doubt. The electors 
followed the only possible course in choosing Charles 
on June 28. They profited, however, by the rivalry of 
the rich king of France to extort enormous bribes and 
concessions from Charles. The banking house of 
Fugger supplied the necessary funds, and in addition 
the agents of the emperor-elect were obliged to sign a 
''capitulation" making all sorts of concessions to the 
princes. One of these, exacted by Frederic of Saxony 
in the interest of Luther, was that no subject should 
be outlawed without being heard. 

The settlement of the imperial election enabled the 
pope once more to turn his attention to the suppres- 
sion of the rapidly growing heresy. After the Leipzig 
debate the universities of Cologne and Louvain had 
condemned Luther's positions. Eck went to Rome in 
March, 1520, and impressed the curia, which was al- 
ready planning a bull condemning the heretic, with the 
danger of delay. After long discussions the bull 
Exsurge Domine was ratified by the College of Car- Bull 
dinals and promulgated by Leo on June 15. In this, ^^^^^l 
forty-one of Luther's sayings, relating to the sacra- 1520 
ments of penance and the eucharist, to indulgences and 



78 



GERMANY 



1521 



October 23, 

1520 

January 27, 

1521 

Tlie Diet of 

Worms 



the power of the pope, to free will and purgatory, and 
to a few other matters, were anathematized as heret- 
ical or scandalous or false or offensive to pious ears. 
His books were condemned and ordered to be burnt, 
and unless he should recant within sixty days of the 
posting of the bull in Germany he was to be considered 
a heretic and dealt with accordingly. Eck was en- 
trusted with the duty of publishing this fulmination in 
Germany, and performed the task in the last days of 
September. 

The time given Luther in which to recant therefore 
expired two months later. Instead of doing so he pub- 
lished several answers to "the execrable bull of Anti- 
christ," and on December 10 publicly and solemnly 
burnt it, together with the whole Canon Law. This 
he had come to detest, partly as containing the 
''forged decretals," partly as the sanction for a vast 
mechanism of ecclesiastical use and abuse, repugnant 
to his more personal theology. The dramatic act, 
which sent a thrill throughout Europe, symbolized the 
passing of some medieval accretions on primitive 
Christianity. There was nothing left for the pope but 
to excommunicate the heretic, as was done in the bull 
Decet Pontificem Romanum drawn up at Rome in Jan- 
uary, and published at Worms on May 6. 

In the meantime Charles had come to Germany. 
For more than a year after his election he remained 
in Spain, where his position was very insecure on ac- 
count of the revolt against his Burgundian officers. 
Arriving in the Netherlands in the summer of 1520 
Charles was met by the special nuncios of the pope, 
Caracciolo and Aleander. After he was crowned em- 
peror at Aix-la-Chapelle, he opened his first Diet, at 
Worms. 

Before this august assembly came three questions 
of highest import. The first related to the dynastic 



THE EEVOLUTION 79 

policy of the Hasburgs. For the chronic war with 
France an army of 24,000 men and a tax of 128,000 
gulden was voted. The disposition of Wurttemberg 
caused some trouble. Duke Ulrich had been deposed 
for rebellion in 1518, and his land taken from him by 
the Swabian League and sold to the emperor in 1520. 
Together with the Austrian lands, which Charles 
secretly handed over to his young brother Ferdinand, 
this territory made the nucleus of Hapsburg power in 
Germany. 

The Diet then took up the question of constitutional 
reform. In order to have a permanent administrative 
body, necessary during the long absences of the em- 
peror, an Imperial Council of Regency was established Council of 
and given a seat at Nuremberg. The emperor nom- ^s^^^y 
inated the president and four of the twenty-two other 
members; each of the six German electors nominated 
one member ; six were chosen by the circles into which 
the Empire was divided and six wore elected by the 
other estates. The powers of the council were limited 
to the times when the emperor was away. 

The third question treated by the Diet was the re- 
ligious one. As usual, they drew up a long list of 
grievances against the pope, to which many good 
Catholics in the assembly subscribed. Next they con- 
sidered what to do with Luther. Charles himself, 
who could speak no language but French, and had no 
sympathy whatever with a rebel from any authority 
spiritual or temporal, would much have preferred to 
outlaw the Wittenberg professor at once, but he was 
bound by his promise to Frederic of Saxony. Of the 
six electors, who sat apart from the other estates, 
Frederic was strongly for Luther, the Elector Palatine 
was favorably inclined towards him, and the Arch- 
bishop of Mayence represented a mediating policy. 
The other three electors were opposed. Among the 



80 GERMANY 

lesser princes a considerable minority was for Luther, 
whereas among the representatives of the free cities 
and of the knights, probably a majority were his fol- 
lowers. The common people, though unrepresented, 
applauded Luther, and their clamors could not pass 
unheeded even by the aristocratic members of the Diet. 

February The debate was opened by Aleander in a speech 
dwelling on the sacramental errors of the heretic and 
the similarity of his movement to that of the detested 
Bohemians. After a stormy session the estates de- 
cided to summon the bold Saxon before them and ac- 
cordingly a citation, together with a safe-conduct, was 
sent him. 

Though there was some danger in obeying the sum- 
mons, Luther's journey to Worms was a triumphal 
progress. Brought before the Diet in the late after- 
noon of April 17, he was asked if a certain number of 
books, the titles of which were read, were his and if he 
would recant the heresy contained in them. The form 
of the questions took him by surprise, for he had ex- 
pected to be confronted with definite charges and to be 
allowed to defend his positions. He accordingly asked 

April 18, f oj. time, and was granted one more day. On his sec- 
ond appearance he made a great oration admitting 
that the books were his and closing with the words : 

Unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason 
(for I trust neither popes nor councils since they have 
often erred and contradicted themselves) ... I neither 
can nor will recant anything since it is neither safe nor 
right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen. 

There he stood, braving the world, for he could do no 
other. . . . He left the hall the hero of his nation. 

Hoping still to convince him of error, Catholic the- 
ologians held protracted but fruitless conferences with 
him before his departure from Worms on the 26th of 



1521 



THE REVOLUTION 81 

April. The sympathy of the people with him was 
sho^^Ti by the posting at Worms of placards threaten- 
ing his enemies. Charles was sincerely shocked and 
immediately drew up a statement that he would hazard 
life and lands on the maintenance of the Catholic faith 
of his fathers. An edict was drafted by Aleander on 
the model of one promulgated in September in the 
Netherlands. The Edict of Worms put Luther under Luther 
the ban of the Empire, commanded his surrender to ^^'^ed 
the government at the expiration of his safe-conduct, 
and forbade all to shelter him or to read his writings. 
Though dated on May 8, to make it synchronize with a 
treaty between Charles and Leo, the Edict was not 
passed by the Diet until May 26. At this time many 
of the members had gone home, and the law was forced 
on the remaining ones, contrary to the wishes of the 
majority, by intrigue and imperial pressure. 

After leaving Worms Luther was taken by his 
prince, Frederic the Wise, and placed for safe keeping 
in the Wartburg, a fine old castle near Eisenach. The 
Here he remained in hiding for nearly a year, while '^^ ^^^ 
doing some of his most important work. Here he 
wrote his treatise On Monastic Voivs, declaring that 
they are wrong and invalid and urging all priests, nuns 
and monks to leave the cloister and to marry. In 
thus freeing thousands of men and women from a life 
often unproductive and sterile Luther achieved one of 
the greatest of his practical reforms. At the Wart- 
burg also Luther began his translation of the Bible. 
The New Testament appeared in September 1522, and 
the Old Testament followed in four parts, the last pub- 
lished in 1532. 

While Luther was in retirement at the Wartburg, The 
bis colleagues Carlstadt and Melanchthon, and the Au- 
gustinian friar Gabriel Zwilling, took up the movement 
at Wittenberg and carried out reforms more radical 



82 



GEEMANY 



December 
27, 1521 



January 20, 
1522 



than those of their leader. The endowments of masses 
were confiscated and applied to the relief of the poor 
on new and better principles. Prostitution was sup- 
pressed. A new order of divine service was intro- 
duced, in which the words purporting that the mass 
was a sacrifice were omitted, and communion was 
given to the laity in both kinds. Priests were urged 
to marry, and monks were almost forced to leave the 
cloister. An element of mob violence early manifested 
itself both at Wittenberg and elsewhere. An outbreak 
at Erfurt against the clergy occurred in June, 1521, 
and by the end of the year riots took place at Witten- 
berg. 

Even now, at the dawn of the revolution, appeared 
the beginnings of those sects, more radical than the 
Lutheran, commonly known as Anabaptist. The small 
industrial town of Zwickau had long been a hotbed of 
Waldensian heresy. Under the guidance of Thomas 
iMiinzer the clothweavers of this place formed a re- 
ligious society animated by the desire to renovate both 
church and state by the readiest and roughest means. 
Suppression of the movement at Zwickau by the gov- 
ernment resulted only in the banishment, or escape, of 
some of the leaders. Three of them found their way 
to Wittenberg, where they proclaimed themselves 
prophets divinely inspired, and conducted a revival 
marked with considerable, though harmless, extrava- 
gance. 

As the radicals at Wittenberg made the whole of 
Northern Germany uneasy, the Imperial Council of 
Regency issued a mandate forbidding all the innova- 
tions and commanding the Elector of Saxony to stop 
them. It is remarkable that Luther in this felt ex- 
actly as did the Catholics. Early in March he re- 
turned to Wittenberg with the express purpose of 
checking the reforms which had already gone too far 



THE REVOLUTION 83 

for him. His personal ascendency was so great that 
he found no trouble in doing so. Not only the Zwickau 
prophets, but Carlstadt and Zwilling were discredited. 
Almost all their measures were repealed, including 
those on divine service Avhich was again restored 
almost to the Catholic form. Not until 1525 were a 
simple communion service and the use of German 
again introduced. 

It soon became apparent that all orders and all parts RebeUion 
of Germany were in a state of ferment. The next ^^Jhts 
manifestation of the revolutionary si)irit was the re- 1522-3 
bellion of the knights. This class, now in a state of 
moral and economic decay, had long survived any use- 
fulness it had ever had. The rise of the cities, the 
aggrandizement of the princes, and the change to a 
commercial from a feudal society all worked to the dis- 
advantage of the smaller nobility and gentry. About 
the only means of livelihood left them was f recbooting, 
and that was adopted without scruple and without 
shame. Envious of the wealthy cities, jealous of the 
greater princes and proud of their tenure immediately 
from the emperor, the knights longed for a new Ger- 
many, more centralized, more national, and, of course, 
under their special direction. In the Lutheran move- 
ment they thought they saw their opjDortunity ; in 
Ulrich von Hutten they found their trmnpet, in Fran- 
cis von Sickingen their sword. A knight himself, but 
with possessions equal to those of many princes, a 
born warrior, but one who knew how to use the new 
weapons, gold and cannon, Sickingen had for years 
before he heard of Luther kept aggrandizing his power 
by predatory feuds. So little honor had he, that, 
though appointed to high military command in the 
campaign against France, he tried to win personal ad- 
vantage by treason, playing off the emperor against 
King Francis, with whom, for a long time, he almost 



84 GERMANY 

openly sided. In 1520 he fell under the influence of 
Hutten, who urged him to espouse the cause of the 
''gospel" as that of German liberty. By August 1522 
he became convinced that the time was ripe for action, 
and issued a manifesto proclaiming that the feudal 
dues had become unbearable, and giving the impres- 
sion that he was acting as an ally of Luther, although 
the latter knew nothing of his intentions and would 
have heartily disapproved of his methods. 

Sickingen's first march was against Treves. The 
archbishop's ''unchristian cannon" forced him to re- 
tire from this city. On October 10 the Council of 
Regency declared him an outlaw. A league formed by 
Treves, the Palatinate and Hesse, defeated him and 
captured his castle at Landstuhl in May, 1523. Mor- 
tally wounded he died on May 7. 

Alike unhurt and unhelped by such incidents as the 

revolt of the knights, the main current of religious 

revolution swept onwards. Leo X died on December 

Adrian VI, 1 1521, and in his place was elected Adrian of Utrecht, 

1522-3 • 

a man of very different character. Though he had 
already taken a strong stand against Luther, he was 
deeply resolved to reform the corruption of the church. 
Diet of To the Diet called at Nuremberg in the latter part of 
1522 ' 1522 he sent as legate Chieregato with a brief demand- 
ing the suppression of the schism. It was monstrous, 
said he, that one little brother should seduce a whole 
nation from the path trodden by so many martyrs and 
learned doctors. Do you suppose, he asked, that the 
people will longer respect civil government if they are 
taught to despise the canons and decrees of the spir- 
itual power? At the same time Adrian wrote to 
Chieregato : 

Say that we frankly confess that God permits this 
persecution of his church on account of the sins of men, 
especially those of the priests and prelates. . . . "We 



THE REVOLUTION 85 

know that in this Holy See now for some years there have 
been many abominations, abuses in spiritual things, ex- 
cesses in things commanded, in short, that all has become 
perverted. . . . "We have all turned aside in our ways, 
nor was there, for a long time, any who did right, — no, 
not one. 

This confession rather strengthened the reform 
party, than othermse, making its demands seem justi- 
fied; and all that the Diet did towards the settlement 
of the religious question was to demand that a council, 
with representation of the laity, should be called in a 
German city. A long list of grievances against the 
church was again drawn up and laid before the em- 
peror. 

The same Diet took up other matters. The need for 
reform and the impotence of the Council of Regency 
had both been demonstrated by the Sickingen affair. 
A law against monopolies was passed, limiting the 
capital of any single company to fifty thousand gulden. 
In order to provide money for the central government 
a customs duty of 4 per cent, ad valorem was ordered. 
Both these measures weighed on the cities, which ac- 
cordingly sent an embassy to Charles. They suc- 
ceeded in inducing him to disallow both laws. 

The next Diet, which assembled at Nuremberg early Diet of 
in 1524, naturally refrained from passing more futile 1524™ "^' 
laws for the emperor to veto, but on the other hand it 
took a stronger stand than ever on the religious ques- 
tion. The Edict of Worms was still nominally in 
force and was still to all intents and purposes flouted. 
Luther was at large and his followers were gaining. 
In reply to a demand from the government that the 
Edict should be strictly carried out, the Diet passed 
a resolution that it should be observ^ed by each state as 
far as its prince deemed it possible. Despairing of 
an oecumenical council the estates demanded that a 



86 GERMANY 

German national synod be called at Spires before the 
close of the year with power to decide on what was to 
be done for the time being. 

There is no donbt that by this time the public opin- 
ion of North Germany, at least, was thoroughly Lu- 
theran. Ferdinand hardly exaggerated when he wrote 

1523 his brother that throughout the Empire there was 

scarce one person in a thousand not infected with the 
new doctrines. The place now occupied by news- 
papers and weekly reviews was taken by a vast swarm 

Popular of pamphlets, most of which have survived. Those of 

pamphlets ^^iq years immediately following the Diet of Worms 
reveal the first enthusiasm of the people for the 
** gospel." The greater part of the broadsides pro- 
duced are concerned with the leader and his doctrines. 
The comparison of him to Huss was a favorite one. 
One pamphleteer, at least, drew the parallel between 
his trial at Worms and that of Christ before Pilate. 
The whole bent of men's minds was theological. Doc- 
trines which now seem a little quaint and trite were 
argued with new fervor by each writer. The destruc- 
tion of images, the question of the real presence in 
the sacrament, justification by faith, and free will were 
disputed. Above all the Bible was lauded in the new 
translation, and the priests continued, as before, to 
be the favorite butt of sarcasm. 

Among the very many writers of these tracts the 
playwright of Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, took a prom- 
inent place. In 1523 he published his poem on ''the 
Nightingale of Wittenberg, whose voice sounds in the 
glorious dawn over hill and dale." This bird is, of 
course, Luther, and the fierce lion who has sought his 

Hans Sachs life is Leo. The next year Hans Sachs published no 
l^ss than three pamphlets favoring the reform. They 
were : 1. A Disputation between a Canon and a Shoe- 
maker, defending the Word of God and the Christian 



THE REVOLUTION 87 

Estate. 2. Conversation on the Hypocritical Works 
of the Clergy and their Vows, by which they hope to 
be saved to the disparagement of Christ's Blood. 3. 
A Dialogue against the Roman Avarice. Multiply 
these pamphlets, the contents of which is indicated by 
their titles, by one hundred, and we arrive at some 
conception of the pabulum on which the people grew 
to Protestantism. Of course there were many pam- 
phlets on the other side, but here, as in a thousand 
other cases, the important thing proved to be to have 
the cause ventilated. So long as discussion was forced 
in the channels selected by the reformers, even the in- 
terest excited by their adversaries redounded ulti- 
mately to their advantage. 

The denunciation of authority, together with the The 
message of the excellence of the humblest Christian ^^^^^^^ 
and the brotherhood of man, powerfully contributed 1524^5 
to the great rising of the lower classes, known as the 
Peasants' War, in 1524-5. It was not, as the name im- 
plied, confined to the rustics, for probably as large a 
proportion of the populace of cities as of the tillers of 
the soil joined it. Nor was there in it anything en- 
tirely new. The cry for justice was of long standing, 
and every single element of the revolt, including the 
hatred of the clergy and demand for ecclesiastical re- 
form, is to be found also in previous risings. Thus, 
the rebellion of peasants under Hans Bohm, commonly 
called the Piper of Niklashausen, in 1476, was brought 
about by a religious appeal. The leader asserted that 
he had special revelations from the Virgin Mary that 
serfdom was to be abolished, and the kingdom of God 
to be introduced by the levelling of all social ranks; 
and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling. 
There had also been two risings, closely connected, 
the first, in 1513, deriving its name of *'Bundschuh" 
from the peasant's tied shoe, a class emblem, and the 



Causes 



88 GERMANY 

second, in 1514, called ''Poor Conrad" after the peas- 
ant's nickname. If the memory of the suppression of 
all these revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, 
on the other hand the successful rise of the Swiss de- 
mocracy was a perpetual example and encouragement 
to them. 

The most fundamental cause of all these risings alike 
was, of course, the cry of the oppressed for justice. 
This is eternal, as is also one of the main alignments 
into which society usually divides itself, the opposition 
of the poor and the rich. It is therefore not very im- 
portant to inquire whether the lot of the third estate 
was getting better or worse during the first quarter 
of the sixteenth century. In either case there was a 
great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown off. 
But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As 
there are diametrically opposite answers to it, both in 
the testimony of contemporaries and in the opinion of 
modern scholars, it is perhaps incapable of being an- 
swered. In some districts, and in some respects, the 
lot of the poor was becoming a little easier; in other 
lands and in different ways it was becoming harder. 
The time was one of general prosperity, in which the 
peasant often shared. The newer methods of agricul- 
ture, manufacture and commerce benefited him who 
knew how to take advantage of them. That some did 
so may be inferred from the statement of Sebastian 
Brant that the rustics dress like nobles, in satin and 
gold chains. On the other hand the rising prices 
would bear hard on those laborers dependent on fixed 
wages, though relieving the burden of fixed rents. 
The whole people, except the merchants, disliked the 
increasing cost of living and legislated against it to 
the best of their ability. Complaints against monop- 
oly were common, and the Diets sometimes enacted 
laws against them. Foreign trade was looked on with 



classes 



THE REVOLUTION 89 

suspicion as draining the country of silver and gold. 
Again, although the peasants benefited by the growing 
stabilitj^ of government, they felt as a grievance the 
introduction of the new Roman law with its emphasis 
upon the rights of property and of the state. Burdens 
directly imposed by the territorial governments were 
probably increasing. If the exactions from the land- 
lords were not becoming greater, it was simply because 
they were always at a maximum. At no time was the 
rich gentleman at a loss to find law and precedent for 
wringing from his serfs and tenants all that they could 
possibly pay. The peasants were of three classes : the Peasant 
serfs, the tenants who paid a quit-rent, and hired la- 
borers. The former, more than the others, perhaps, 
had now arrived at the determination to assert their 
rights. For them the Peasants' War was the in- 
evitable break with a long economic past, now intol- 
erable and hopeless. There is some evidence to show 
that the number of serfs was increasing. This proc- 
ess, by menacing the freedom of the others, united all 
in the resolve to stop the gradual enslavement of their 
class, and to reckon with those who benefited by it. 

How little new there was in the ideals of the last and 
most terrible of the peasant risings may be seen by a 
study of the programs of reform put forward from 
time to time during the preceding century. There is 
nothing in the manifestos of 1525 that may not be 
found in the pamphlets of the fifteenth century. The 
grievances are the same, and the hope of a completely 
renovated and communized society is the same. One 
of the most influential of these socialistic pamphlets 
was the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigis- 
niund, written by an Augsburg clergjTuan about 1438, 
first printed in 1-1-76, and reprinted a number of times 
before the end of the century. Its title bears witness 
to the Messianic belief of the people that one of their 



90 GERMANY 

great, old emperors should sometime return and re- 
store the world to a condition of justice and happiness. 
The present tract preached that ''obedience was dead 
and justice sick"; it attacked serfdom as wicked, de- 
nounced the ecclesiastical law and demanded the free- 
dom given by Christ. 

The same doctrine, adapted to the needs of the time, 
is preached in the Reformation of the Emperor Fred- 
eric III, published anonymously in 1523. Though 
more radical than Luther it reflects some of his ideas. 
Still more, however, does it embody the reforms pro- 
posed at Nuremberg in 1523. It may probably have 
been written by George Riixner, called Jerusalem, an 
Imperial Herald prominent in these circles. It ad- 
vocated the abolition of all taxes and tithes, the repeal 
of all imperial civil laws, the reform of the clergy, the 
confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and the limita- 
tion of the amount of capital allowed any one merchant 
to 10,000 gulden. 

Though there was nothing new in either the manner 
of oppression or in the demands of the third estate 
during the last decade preceding the great rebellion, 
there does seem to be a new atmosphere, or tone, in 
the literature addressed to the lower classes. While 
on the one hand the poor were still mocked and in- 
sulted as they always had been by foolish and heartless 
possessors of inherited wealth and position, from other 
,, quarters they now began to be also flattered and 
courted. The peasant became in the large pamphlet 
The literature of the time an ideal figure, the type of the 

fdedSld plain, honest. God-fearing man. Nobles like Duke 
Ulrich of Wiirttemberg affected to be called by popu- 
lar nicknames. Carlstadt and other learned men pro- 
claimed that the peasant knew better the Word of 
God and the way of salvation than did the learned. 
Many radical preachers, especially the Anabaptist 



THE REVOLUTION 91 

Miinzer, carried the message of human brotherhood to 
the point of communism. There were a number of 
lay preachers, the most celebrated being the physician 
Hans Maurer, who took the sobriquet ^'Karsthans." 
This name, ''the man with the hoe," soon became one 
of the catch-words of the time, and made its way into 
popular speech as a synonym for the simple and pious 
laborer. Hutten took it up and urged the people to 1521 
seize flails and pitchforks and smite the clergy and the 
pope as they would the devil. Others preached hatred 
of the Jews, of the rich, of lawyers. Above all they 
appealed to the Bible as the divine law, and demanded 
a religious reform as a condition and preliminary to a 
thorough renovation of society. Although Luther 
himself from the first opposed all forms of violence, 
his clarion voice rang out in protest against the in- 
justice of the nobles. ''The people neither can nor 
will endure your tyranny any longer," he said to them 
in 1523, "God will not endure it; the world is not what 
it once was when you drove and hunted men like wild 
beasts." 

The rising began at Stuhlingen, not far from the 
Swiss frontier, in June 1524, and spread with consid- 
erable rapidity northward, until the greater part of 
Germany was in the throes of revolution. The rebels 
were able to make headway because most of the regu- 
lar troops had been withdrawn to the Turkish front or 
to Italy to fight the emperor's battle against France. 
In South Germany, during the first six months, the 
gatherings of peasants and townsmen were eminently 
peaceable. They wished only to negotiate with their 
masters and to secure some practical reforms. But 
when the revolt spread to Franconia and Saxony, a 
much more radically socialistic program was devel- 
oped and the rebels showed themselves readier to en- 
force their demands by arms. For the year 1524 there 



92 GERMANY 

was no general manifesto put forward, but there were 
negotiations between the insurgents and their quon- 
dam masters. In this district or in that, lists of very 
specific grievances were presented and redress de- 
manded. In some cases merely to gain time, in others 
sincerely, the lords consented to reply to these pe- 
titions. They denied this or that charge, and they 
promised to end this or that form of oppression. 
Neither side was prejoared for civil war. In all it was 
more like a modern strike than anything else. 

In the early months of 1525 several programs were 
drawn up of a more general nature than those pre- 
viously composed, and yet by no means radical. The 
The Twelve most famous of these was called The Twelve Arti- 
cles, printed and widely circulated in February. The 
exact place at which they originated is unknown. 
The authorship has been much disputed, and neces- 
sarily so, for they were the work of no one brain, but 
were as composite a production as is the Constitution 
of the United States. The material in them is drawn 
from the mouths of a whole people. Far more than 
in other popular writings one feels that they are the 
genuine expression of the public opinion of a great 
class. Probably their draftsman was Sebastian Lotz- 
er, the tanner who for years past had preached apos- 
tolic communism. It is not impossible that the Ana- 
baptist Balthasar Hiibmaier had a hand in them. 
Their demands are moderate and would be considered 
matters of self-evident justice to-day. The first arti- 
cle is for the right of each community to choose its O'wti 
pastor; the second protests against the minor tithes 
on vegetables paid to the clergy, though expressly ad- 
mitting the legality of the tithes on grain. The third 
article demands freedom for the serfs, the fourth and 
fifth ask for the right to hunt and to cut wood in the 
forests. The sixth, seventh and eighth articles pro- 



THE REVOLUTION 93 

test against excessive forced labor, illegal payments 
and exorbitant rents. The ninth article denounces the 
new (Roman) law, and requests the reestablishment of 
the old (German) law. The tenth article voices the in- 
dignation of the poor at the enclosure by the rich of 
commons and other free land. The eleventh demands 
the abolition of the heriot, or inheritance tax, by which 
the widow of a rustic was obliged to yield to her lord 
the best head of cattle or other valuable possession. 
The final article expresses the willingness of the in- 
surgents to have all their demands submitted to the 
Word of God. Both here and in the preamble the en- 
tire assimilation of divine and human law is postu- 
lated, and the charge that the Lutheran Gospel caused 
sedition, is met. 

Though the Twelve Articles were adopted by more other 
of the bands of peasants than was any other program, °^a°^«sto3 
yet there were several other manifestos drawn up 
about the same time. Thus, in the Fifty-nine Articles 
of the Stiihlingen peasants the same demands are put 
forth w4th much more detail. The legal right to trial 
by due process of law is asserted, and vexatious pay- 
ments due to a lord when his peasant marries a woman 
from another estate, are denounced. But here, too, _ 
and elsewhere, the fundamental demands were the ^ 
same: freedom from serfdom, from oppressive taxa- 
tion and forced labor, and for unrestricted rights of 
hunting and woodcutting in the forests. Everywhere 
there is the same claim that the rights of the people 
are sanctioned by the law of God, and generally the 
peasants assume that they are acting in accordance 
with the new ''gospel" of Luther. The Swabians ex- 
pressly submitted their demands to the arbitration of 
a commission of four to consist of a representative of 
the emperor, Frederic of Saxony, Luther and either 
Melanchthon or Bugenhagen. 



94 



GERMANY 



Miinzer 



Suppres- 
sion of tlie 



February 
24, 1525 



When the revolt reached the central part of Ger- 
many it became at once more socialistic and more 
bloody. The baleful eloquence of Thomas Miinzer was 
exerted at Miihlhausen to nerve the people to strike 
down the godless with pitiless sword. Already in Sep- 
tember 1524 he preached: "On! on! on! This is the 
time when the wicked are as fearful as hounds. . . . 
Regard not the cries of the godless. . . . On, while the 
fire is hot. Let not your swords be cold from blood. 
Smite bang, bang on the anvil of Nimrod; cast his 
tower to the ground!" Other leaders took up the 
message and called for the extirpation of the tyrants, 
including both the clergy and the lords. Communism 
was demanded as in the apostolic age; property was 
denounced as wrong. Regulation of prices was one 
measure put forward, and the committing of the gov- 
ernment of the country to a university another. 

The propaganda of deeds followed close upon the 
propaganda of words. During the spring of 1525 in 
central Germany forty-six cloisters and castles were 
burned to the ground, while violence and rapine 
reigned supreme with all the ferocity characteristic of 
class warfare. On Easter Sunday, April 16, one of the 
best-armed bands of peasants, under one of the most 
brutal leaders, Jacklein Rohrbach, attacked Weins- 
berg. The count and his small garrison of eighteen 
knights surrendered and were massacred by the in- 
surgents, who visited mockery and insult upon the 
countess and her daughters. Many of the cities joined 
the peasants, and for a short time it seemed as if the 
rebellion might be successful. 

But in fact the insurgents were poorly equipped, 
untrained, without cooperation or leadership. As 
soon as the troops which won the battle of Pavia in 
Italy were sent back to Germany the whole movement 
collapsed. The Swabian League inflicted decisive de- 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY ^5 

feats upon the rebels at Leipheim on April 4, and at 
Wurzach ten days later. Other blows followed in 
May. In the center of Germany the Saxon Electorate 
lay supine. Frederic the Wise died in the midst of j^j 5 j525 
the tumult after expressing his opinion that it was 
God's will that the common man should rule, and that 
it would be wrong to resist the divine decree. His 
young neighbor, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, acted 
vigorously. After coming to terms with his own sub- 
jects by negotiations, he raised troops and met a band 
of insurgents at Frankenhausen. He wished to treat 
with them also, but Miinzer's fanaticism, promising 
the deluded men supernatural aid, nerved them to re- 
ject all terms. In the very ancient German style they 
built a barricade of wagons, and calmly awaited the 
attack of the soldiers. Undisciplined and poorly May 15 
armed, almost at the first shot they broke and fled in 
panic, more than half of them perishing on the field. 
Miinzer was captured, and, after having been forced " 
by torture to sign a confession of his misdeeds, was 
executed. After this there was no strength left in 
the peasant cause. The lords, having gained the up- 
per hand, put do^vn the rising with great cruelty. The 
estimates of the numbers of peasants slain vary so 
widely as to make certainty impossible. Perhaps a 
hundred thousand in all perished. The soldiers far 
outdid the rebels in savage reprisals. The laborers 
sank back into a more wretched state than before ; op- 
pression stalked with less rebuke than ever through 
the land. 



§ 3. The Formation of the Protestant Party 
In the sixteenth century politics were theological. Defections 

from 
Luther 



The groups into which men divided had religious ^'"°™ 



slogans and were called churches, but they were also 
political parties. The years following the Diet of 



96 GERMANY 

Worms saw the crystallization of a new group, which 
was at first liberal and reforming and later, as it grew 
in stability, conservative. At Worms almost all the 
liberal forces in Germany had been behind Luther, the 
intellectuals, the common people with their wish for 
social amelioration, and those to whom the religious 
issue primarily appealed. But this support offered by 
public opinion was vague ; in the next years it became 
both more definite and more limited. At the same 
time that city after city and state after state was 
openly revolting from the pope, until the Reformers 
had won a large constituency in the Imperial Diets and 
a place of constitutional recognition, there was going 
on another process by which one after another certain 
elements at first inclined to support Luther fell away 
from him. During these years he violently dissociated 
himself from the extreme radicals and thus lost the 
support of the proletariat. In the second place the 
growing definiteness and narrowness of his dogmatism, 
and his failure to show hospitality to science and phi- 
losophy alienated a number of intellectuals. Third, 
a great schism weakened the Protestant church. But 
these losses were counterbalanced by two gains. The 
first was the increasing discipline and coherence of the 
new churches ; the second was their gradual but rapid 
attainment of the support of the middle and governing 
classes in many German states. 
Jhe ^ Luther's struggle with radicalism had begun within 

a year after his stand at Worms. He had always been 
consistently opposed to mob violence, even when he 
might have profited by it. At Worms he disapproved 
Hutten's plans for drawing the sword against the 
Romanists. When, from his ' ' watchtowcr, " he first 
spied the disorders at Wittenberg, he wrote that not- 
withstanding the great provocation given to the com- 
mon man by the clergy, yet tumult was the work, of 



Radicals 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 97 

the devil. When he returned home he preached that 
the only weapon the Christian ought to use was the 
Word. ''Had I wished it," said he then, ''I might 
have brought Germany to civil war. Yes, at Worms 
I might have started a game that would not have been 
safe for the emperor, but it would have been a fool's 
game. So I did nothing, but only let the Word act." 
Driven from Wittenberg, the Zwickau prophets, as- 
sisted by Thomas Miinzer, continued their agitation 
elsewhere. As long as their propaganda was peaceful 
Luther was inclined to tolerate it. "Let them teach 
what they like," said he, ''be it gospel or lies." But 
when they began to preach a campaign of fire and 
sword, Luther wrote, in July 1524, to his elector bog- 
ging him "to act vigorously against their storming 
and ranting, in order that God's kingdom may be ad- 
vanced by word only, as becomes Christians, and that 
all cause of sedition may be taken from the multitude 
[Herr Omnes, literally Mr. Everybody], more than 
enough inclined to it already." 

When the revolt at last broke out Luther was looked - 
up to and appealed to by the people as their champion. 
In April 1525 he composed an Exhortation to Peace on Exhortation 
the Twelve Articles of the Swahian Peasants, in which ^ ^^'^ 
he distributed the blame for the present conditions lib- 
erally, but impartially, on both sides, aristocrats and 
peasants. To the former he said that their tyranny, . 
together with that of the clergy, had brought this pun- 
ishment on themselves, and that God intended to smite 
them. To the peasants he said that no tyranny was 
excuse for rebellion. Of their articles he approved of 
tv7o only, that demanding the right to choose their 
pastors and that denouncing the heriot or death-duty. 
Their second demand, for repeal of some of the tithes, 
he characterized as robbery, and the third, for freedom 
of the serf, as unjustified because it made Christian 



98 GERMANY 

liberty a merely external thing, and because Paul had 

said that the bondman should not seek to be free 
(I Cor. vii, 20 f). The other articles were referred to 
legal experts. 

Hardly had this pamphlet come from the press be- 
fore Luther heard of the deeds of violence of Eohrbach 
and his fellows. Fearing that complete anarchy 
would result from the triumph of the insurgents, 
against whom no effective blow had yet been struck. 
The he wrote a tract Against the Thievish, Murderous 

peasants Hordes of Peasants. In this he denounced them with 

denounced •' 

the utmost violence of language, and urged the govern- 
ment to smite them without pity. Everyone should 
avoid a peasant as he would the devil, and should join 
the forces to slay them like mad dogs. *'If you die in 
battle against them," said he to the soldiers, ^'you 
could never have a more blessed end, for you die 
obedient to God's Word in Romans 13, and in the 
service of love to free your neighbor from the bands 
of hell and the devil." A little later he wrote: '*It is 
better that all the peasants be killed than that the 
princes and magistrates perish, because the rustics 
took the sword without divine authority. The only 
possible consequence of their Satanic wickedness 
would be the diabolic devastation of the kingdom of 
God." And again: ''One cannot argue reasonably 
/ with a rebel, but one must answer him with the fist 
so that blood flows from his nose." Melanchthon en- 
tirely agreed with his friend. ''It is fairly written in 
Ecclesiasticus xxxiii," said he, "that as the ass must 
have fodder, load, and whip, so must the servant have 
bread, work, and punishment. These outward, bodily 
servitudes are needful, but this institution [serfdom] 
is certainly pleasing to God. ' ' 

Inevitably such an attitude alienated the lower 
classes. From this time, many of them looked not to 



The 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 99 

the Lutheran but to the more radical sects, called Ana- 
baptists, for help. The condition of the Empire at 
this time was very similar to that of many countries 
today, where we find two large upper and middle-class 
parties, the conservative (Catholic) and liberal (Prot- 
estant) over against the radical or socialistic (Ana- 
baptist). 

The most important thing about the extremists was 
not their habit of denying the validity of infant bap- Anabaptists 
tism and of rebaptizing their converts, from which 
they derived their name. What really determined 
their view-point and program was that they repre- 
sented the poor, uneducated, disinherited classes. 
The party of extreme measures is always chiefly con- 
stituted from the proletariat because it is the very 
poor who most pressingly feel the need for change 
and because they have not usually the education to 
judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack 
nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes. 
A complete break with the past and with the existing 
order has no terrors for them, but only promise. 

A radical party almost always includes men of a 
wide variety of opinions. So the sixteenth century 
classed together as Anabaptists men with not only 
divergent but with diametrically opposite views on the 
most vital questions. Their only common bond was 
that they all alike rejected the authoritative, tradi- 
tional, and aristocratic organization of both of the 
larger churches and the pretensions of civil society. It 
is e/isy to see that they had no historical perspective, 
and that they tried to realize the ideals of primitive 
Christianity, as they understood it, without reckoning 
the vast changes in culture and other conditions, and 
yet it is impossible not to have a deep sympathy with 
the men most of whose demands were just and who 
sealed their faith with perpetual martyrdom. Not- 



100 GERMANY 

Spread of withstanding the heavy blow to reform given in the 
ra icaism crushing of the peasants' rising, radical doctrines con- 
tinued to spread among the people. As the poor found 
their spiritual needs best supplied in the conventicle of 
dissent, official Lutheranism became an established 
church, predominantly an aristocratic and middle-class 
party of vested interest and privilege. 

It is sometimes said that the origin and growth of 
the Anabaptists was due to the German translation of 
the Bible. This is not true and yet there is little doubt 
that the publication of the German version in 1522 and 
the years immediately following, stimulated the growth 
of many sects. The Bible is such a big book, and cap- 
able of so many different interpretations, that it is not 
strange that a hundred different schemes of salvation 
should have been deduced from it by those who came 
to it with different prepossessions. While many of 
the Anabaptists were perfect quietists, preaching the 
duty of non-resistance and the wickedness of bearing 
arms, even in self-defence, others found sanction for 
quite opposite views in the Scripture, and proclaimed 
that the godless should be exterminated as the Canaan- 
ites had been. In ethical matters some sects practised 
the severest code of morals, while others were dis- 
tinguished by laxity. By some marriage was forbid- 
den ; others wanted all the marriage they could get and 
advocated polygamy''. The religious meetings were 
similar to ''revivals," frequently of the most hys- 
terical sort. Claiming that they were mystically 
united to God, or had direct revelations from him, they 
rejected the ceremonies and sacraments of historic 
Christianity, and sometimes substituted for them 
practices of the most absurd, or most doubtful, char- 
acter. When Melchior Rink preached, his followers 
howled like dogs, bellowed like cattle, neighed like 
horses, and brayed like asses — some of them very nat- 



THE PROTESTANT PAETY 101 

nrally, no doubt.' In certain extreme cases the meet- 
ings ended in debaucherj^ while we know of men who 
committed murder in the belief that they were directed 
so to do by special revelation of God. Thus at St. 
Gall one brother cut another's throat, while one of the 
saints trampled his wife to death under the influence 
of the spirit. But it is unfair to judge the whole 
movement by these excesses. 

The new sectaries, of course, ran the gauntlet of 
persecution. In 1529 the emperor and Diet at Spires 
passed a mandate against them to this effect: ''By the 
plenitude of our imperial power and wisdom we or- 
dain, decree, oblige, declare, and will that all Anabap- 
tists, men and women who have come to the age of 
understanding, shall bo executed and deprived of their 
natural life by fire, sword, and the like, according to 
opportunity and without previous inquisition of the 
spiritual judges." Lutherans united with Catholics 
in passing this edict, and showed no less alacrity in 
executing it. As early as 1525 the Anabaptists were 
persecuted at Zurich, where one of their earliest com- 
munities sprouted. Some of the leaders were dro\vned, 
others wore banished and so spread their tenets else- 
wliere. Catholic princes exterminated them by fire 
and sword. In Lutheran Saxony no less than thirteen 
of the poor non-conformists were executed, and many 
more imprisoned for long terms, or banished. 

And yet the radical sects continued to grow. The 
dauntless zeal of Melchior Hofmann braved all for the 
propagation of their ideas. For a while he found a 
refuge at Strassburg, but this city soon became too 
orthodox to hold him. He then turned to Holland, 
where the seed sowed fell into fertile ground. Two 
Dutchmen, the baker Jolm ]\Iattliys of Haarlem and 
the tailor John Beuckelssen of Leyden went to the 
episcopal city of Miinster in Westphalia near the Dutch MUnster 



102 



GERMANY 



border, and rapidly converted the mass of the people 
to their own belief in the advent of the kingdom of God 
,on earth. An insurrection expelled the bishop's gov- 
ernment and installed a democracy in February, 1534. 
After the death of Matthys on April 5, a rising of the 
people against the dictatorial power of Beucklessen 
was suppressed by this fanatic who thereupon crowned 
himself king under the title of John of Leyden. Com- 
munism of goods was introduced and also polygamy. 
The city was now besieged by its suzerain, the Bishop 
of Miinster, and after horrible sufferings had been in- 
flicted on the population, taken by storm on June 25, 
1535. The surviving leaders were put to death by 
torture. 

The defeat itself was not so disastrous to the Ana- 
baptist cause as were the acts of the leaders when in 
power. As the Reformer Bullinger put it: ^'God 
opened the eyes of the governments by the revolt at 
Miinster, and thereafter no one would trust even those 
Anabaptists who claimed to be innocent." Their lack 
of unity and organization told against them. Never- 
theless the sect smouldered on in the lower classes, 
constantly subject to the fires of martyrdom, until, 
toward the close of the century, it attained some co- 
hesion and respectability. The later Baptists, Inde- 
pendents, and Quakers all inherited some portion of 
its spiritual legacies. To the secular historian its 
chief interest is in the social teachings, which con- 
sistently advocated tolerance, and frequently various 
forms of anarchy and socialism. 



Defection 
of the 
humanists 



Next to the defection of the laboring masses, the se- 
verest loss to the Evangelical party in these years was 
that of a large number of intellectuals, who, having 
hailed Luther as a deliverer from ecclesiastical bond- 
age, came to see in him another pope, not less tyran- 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 103 

nous than he of Rome. Reuchlin the Hebrew scholar 
and Mutian the philosopher had little sympathy with 
any dogmatic subtlety. Zasius the jurist was repelled 
by the haste and rashness of Luther. The so-called 
"godless painters" of Nuremberg, George Penz and 
the brothers Hans and Bartholomew Beham, having 
rejected in large part Christian doctrine, were nat- 
urally not inclined to join a new church, even when 
they deserted the old. 

But a considerable number of humanists, and those 
the greatest, after having welcomed the Reformation 
in its first, most liberal and hopeful youth, deliberately 
turned their backs on it and cast in their lot with the 
Roman communion. The reason was that, whereas the 
old faith mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, 
and dogmatisms abominated by the humanists, it had 
also, at this early stage in the schism, within its close 
a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant opinion. 
The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though 
they purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, 
were forced, partly by their position, partly by the 
temper of their leaders, to a raw self-assertiveness, a 
bald concentration on the points at issue, incompatible 
with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness. How 
the humanists would have chosen had they seen the 
Index and Loyola, is problematical; but while there 
was still hope of reshaping Rome to their liking they 
had little use for Wittenberg. 

I admit that for some years I was very favorably in- 
clined to Luther's enterprise [wrote Crotus Rubcanus in Rubeanus 
1531], but when I saw that nothing was left untorn and 
undofilod ... I thought the devil might bring in great 
evil in the guise of something good, using Scripture as his 
shield. So I decided to remain in the church in which I 
was baptized, reared and taught. Even if some fault 
might be found in it, yet in time it might have been im- 



104 GERMANY 

proved, sooner, at any rate, than in the new church which 
in a few years has been torn b}^ so many sects. 

"Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Greek scholar and his- 
torian of Nuremberg, hailed Luther so warmly at first 
that he was put under the ban of the bull Exsurge 
Domine. By 1529, however, he had come to believe 
him insolent, impudent, either insane or possessed by 
a devil. 

I do not deny [he wrote] that at the beginning all 
Luther's acts did not seem to be vain, since no good man 
could be pleased with all those errors and impostures that 
had accumulated gradually in Christianity. So, with 
others, I hoped that some remedy might be applied to 
such great evils, but I was cruelly deceived. For, before 
the former errors had been extirpated, far more intol- 
erable ones crept in, compared to which the others seemed 
child's play. 

Appeal to To Erasmus, the wise, the just, all men turned as 
rasmus ^^ ^^^ arbiter of opinion. From the first, Luther 
counted on his support, and not without reason, for 
the humanist spoke well of the Theses and commen- 
taries of the Wittenberger. On March 28, 1519, Luther 
addressed a letter to him, as ''our glory and hope," 
acknowledging his indebtedness and begging for sup- 
port. Erasmus answered in a friendly way, at the 
same time sending a message encouraging the Elector 
Frederic to defend his innocent subject. 

Dreading nothing so much as a violent catastrophe, 
the humanist labored for the next two years to find a 
peaceful solution for the threatening problem. See- 
ing that Luther's two chief errors were that he ''had 
attacked the crown of the pope and the bellies of the 
monks, ' ' Erasmus pressed upon men in power the plan 
of allowing the points in dispute to be settled by an im- 
partial tribunal, and of imposing silence on both par- 
ties. At the same time he begged Luther to do nothing 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 105 

violent and urged that his enemies be not allowed to 
take extreme measures against him. But after the 
publication of the pamphlets of 1520 and of the bull 
condemning the heretic, this position became unten- 
able. Erasmus had so far compromised himself in 
the eyes of the inquisitors that he fled from Louvain 
in the autumn of 1521, and settled in Basle. He was 
strongly urged by both parties to come out on one side 
or the other, and he was openly taunted by Ulrich von 
Hutten, a hot Lutheran, for cowardice in not doing so. 
Alienated by this and by the dogmatism and intoler- 
ance of Luther's writings, Erasmus finally defined his 
position in a Diatribe on Free Will. As Luther's 1^24 
theory of the bondage of the will was but the other 
side of his doctrine of justification b}^ faith only — for 
where God's grace does all there is nothing left for hu- 
man effort — Erasmus attacked the very center of the 
Evangelical dogmatic system. The question, a deep 
psychological and metaphysical one, was much in the 
air. Valla having written on it a work published in 
151S, and Pomponazzi having also composed a work 
on it in 1520, which was, however, not published until 
much later. It is noticeable that Erasmus selected this 
point rather than one of the practical reforms advo- 
cated at Wittenberg, with which he w^as much in sym- 
pathy. Luther replied in a volume on TJie Bondage 
of the Will reasserting his position more strongly than 1525 
ever. How theological, rather than philosophical, his 
opinion was may be seen from the fact that while he 
admitted that a man w^as free to choose which of two 
indifferent alternatives he should take, he denied that 
any of these choices could work salvation or real 
righteousness in God's eyes. He did not hesitate to 
say that God saved and damned souls irrespective of 
merit. Erasmus answered again in a large work, the 
Ilyperaspistes {Heavy- Armed Soldier), which came 



106 GERMANY 

1526-7 out ill two parts. In this he offers a general critique 
of the Lutheran movement. Its leader, he says, is a 
dogmatist, who never recoils from extremes logically 
demanded by his premises, no matter how repugnant 
they may be to the heart of man. But for himself he 
is a humanist, finding truth in the reason as well as 
in the Bible, and abhorring paradoxes. 

The controversy was not allowed to drop at this 
point. Many a barbed shaft of wit-winged sarcasm 
was shot by the light-armed scholar against the ranks 
of the Reformers. ''Where Lutheranism reigns," 
he wrote Pirckheimer, ''sound learning perishes." 
"With disgust," he confessed to Ber, "I see the cause 
of Christianity approaching a condition that I should 
be very unwilling to have it reach . . . While we 
are quarreling over the booty the victory will slip 
through our fingers. It is the old story of private 
interests destroying the commonwealth." Erasmus 
first expressed the opinion, often maintained since, 
that Europe was experiencing a gradual revival both 
of Christian piety and of sound learning, when Lu- 
ther's boisterous attack plunged the world into a tu- 
mult in which both were lost sight of. On March 30, 
1527, he wrote to Maldonato: 

I brought it about that sound learning, which among 
the Italians and especially among the Romans savored of 
nothing but pure paganism, began nobly to celebrate 
Christ, in whom we ought to boast as the sole author of 
both wisdom and happiness if we are true Christians. 
... I always avoided the character of a dogmatist, ex- 
cept in certain obiter dicta which seemed to me conducive 
to correct studies and against the preposterous judgments 
of men. 

In the same letter he tells how hard he had fought 
the obscurantists, and adds: "While we were waging 
a fairly equal battle against these monsters, behold 



THE PEOTESTANT PAETY 107 

Lntlior suddenly arose and threw the apple of Discord 
into the world." 

In short, Erasmus left the Eeformers not because 
they were too liberal, but because they were too con- 
ser^^ative, and because he disapproved of violent meth- 
ods. His gentle temperament, not without a touch of 
timidity, made him abhor the tumult and trust to the 
voice of persuasion. In failing to secure the support 
of the humanists Protestantism lost heavily, and espe- 
cially abandoned its chance to become the party of 
progress. Luther himself was not only disappointed 
in the disaffection of Erasmus, but was sincerely re- 
pelled by his rationalism. A man who could have the 
least doubt about a doctrine was to him **an Arian, 
an atheist, and a skeptic." He went so far as to say 
that the great Dutch scholar's primary object in pub- 
lishing the Greek New Testament was to make readers 
doubtful about the text, and that the chief end of his 
Colloquies was to mock all piety. Erasmus, whose 
services to letters were the most distinguished and 
whose ideal of Christianity was the loveliest, has suf- 
fered far too much in being judged by his relation to 
the Eeformation. By a great Catholic ^ he has been 
called "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," 
bj^ an eminent Protestant scholar ^ *'a John the Bap- 
tist and Judas in one." 

The battle with the humanists was synchronous with Sacra- 
the beginnings of a fierce internecine strife that tore ^^"3^^^° 
the young evangelical church into two parts. Though 
the controversy between Luther and his principal rival, 
Ulrich Zwingli, was really caused by a wide difference 
of thought on many subjects, it focused its rays, like 
a burning-glass, upon one point, the doctrine of the 
real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the 

1 Alexander Pope. 

2 Walther Kohler. 



108 GERMANY 

eucliarist. The explanation of this mystery evolved 
in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Lateran Coun- 
cil of 1215, was the theory, called ''transubstantia- 
tion," that the substance of the bread turned into the 
substance of the body, and the substance of the wine 
into the substance of the blood, without the *' acci- 
dents" of appearance and taste being altered. Some 
of the later doctors of the church, Durand and Occam, 
opposed this theor}% though they proposed a nearly 
allied one, called '^consubstantiation," that the body 
and blood are present with the bread and wine. Wy- 
clif and others, among whom was the Italian philoso- 
pher Pico della Mirandola, proposed the theory now 
held in most Protestant churches that the bread and 
wine are mere symbols of the body and blood. 

At the dawn of the Eeformation the matter was 
brought into prominence by the Dutch theologian 
Symbolism Hocn, from whom the symbolic interpretation was 
adopted first by Carlstadt and then by the Swiss Re- 
formers Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Luther himself 
w^avered. He attacked the sacrifice of the mass, in 
which he saw a "good work" repugnant to faith, and 
a great practical abuse, as in the endowed masses for 
souls, but he finally decided on the question of the 
real presence that the words "this is my body" were 
"too strong for him" and meant just what they said. 

After a preliminary skirmish with Carlstadt, result- 
ing in the latter 's banishment from Saxony, there was 
a long and bitter war of pens between Wittenberg and 
the Swiss Reformers. Once the battle was joined it 
was sure to be acrimonious because of the self-con- 
sciousness of each side. Luther always assumed that 
he had a monopoly of truth, and that those who pro- 
posed different views were infringing his copyright, 
so to speak. "Zwingli, Carlstadt and Oecolampadius 
would never have known Christ's gospel rightly," he 



THE PEOTESTANT PARTY 109 

opined, **had not Luther written of it 'first." He soon 
compared them to Absalom rebelling against his father 
David, and to Judas betraying his Master. Zwingli 
on his side was almost equallj^ sure that he had dis- 
covered the truth independently of Luther, and, while 
expressing approbation of his work, refused to be 
called by his name. His invective was only a shade 
less virulent than was that of his opponent. 

The substance of the controversy was far from 
being the straight alignment between reason and tradi- 
tion that it has sometimes been represented as. Both 
sides assumed the inerrancy of Scripture and appealed 
primarily to the same biblical arguments. Luther had 
no difficulty in proving that the words "hoc est coi'pus 
meum" meant that the bread was the body, and he 
stated that this must be so even if contrary to our 
senses. Zwingli had no difficulty in proving that the 
thing itself was impossible, and therefore inferred that 
the biblical words must be explained away as a figure 
of speech. In a long and learned controversy neither 
side convinced the other, but each became so exasper- 
ated as to believe the other possessed of the devil. "In 
the spring of 1529 Lutherans joined Catholics at the 
Diet of Spires in refusing toleration to the Zwinglians. 

The division of Protestants of course weakened 
them. Their leading statesman, Philip, Landgrave of 
Hesse, seeing this, did his best to reconcile the leaders. 
For several years he tried to get them to hold a con- 
ference, but in vain. Finally, he succeeded in bring- ^la^burg 
ing together at his castle at Marburg on the Lalm, October 
Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and a 1-3, 1529 
large number of other divines. The discussion here 
only served to bring out more strongly the irreconcil- 
ability of the two ** spirits." Shortly afterwards, 
when the question of a political alliance came up, the 
Saion theologians drafted a memorial stating that 



1530 



110 GEEMANY 

they would rather make an agreement with the heathen 
than with the ' ' sacramentarians. ' ' The same attitude 
was preserved at the Diet of Augsburg, where the 
Lutherans were careful to avoid all appearance of 
friendship with the Zwinglians lest they should com- 
promise their standing with the Catholics. Zwingli 
and his friends were hardly less intransigeant. 
October 11, When Zwingli died in battle with the Catholic can- 

1531 

tons and when Oecolampadius succumbed to a fever a 
few weeks later, Luther loudly proclaimed that this 
was a judgment of God and a triumph for his own 
party. Though there was no hope of reconciling the 
Swiss, the South German Zwinglians, headed by the 
Strassburg Eeformers Bucer and Capito, hastened to 
come to an understanding with Wittenberg, without 
which their position would have been extremely per- 
ilous. Bucer claimed to represent a middle doctrine, 
such as was later asserted by Calvin. As no middle 
ground is possible, the doctrine is unintelligible, being, 
in fact, nothing but the statement, in strong terms, of 
two mutually exclusive propositions. After much hu- 
miliation the divines succeeded, however, in satisfying 
Luther, with whom they signed the Wittenberg Con- 
cord on May 29, 1536. The Swiss still remained with- 
out the pale, and Luther's hatred of them grew with 
the years. Shortly before his death he wrote that he 
would testify before the judgment-seat of God his 
loathing for the sacramentarians. He became more 
and more conservative, bringing back to the sacrament 
some of the medieval superstitions he had once ex- 
pelled. He began again to call it an offering and a 
sacrifice and again had it elevated in church for the 
adoration of the faithful. He wavered on this point, 
because, as he said, he doubted whether it were more 
his duty to "spite" the papists or the sacramentarians. 
He finally decided on the latter, "and if necessary," 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 111 

continued he, *'I will have the host elevated three, 
seven, or ten times, for I will not let the devil teach 
me anything in my church. ' ' 

Notwithstanding the bitter controversies just related Growth of 
Lutheranism flourished mightilv in the body of the Lutheran- 

~ *^ '' ism in mid- 

people who were neither peasants nor intellectuals nor die and 

Swiss. The appeal was to the upper and middle "pp^"^ 

, ^ ^ ^ ^ classes 

classes, sufficiently educated to discard some of the 
medievalism of the Roman Church and impelled also 
by nationalism and economic self-interest to turn from 
the tyranny of the pope. City after city and state 
after state enlisted under the banner of Luther. He 
continued to appeal to them through the press. As a 
popular pamphleteer he must be reckoned among the 
very ablest. His faults, coarseness and unbridled vio- 
lence of language, did not alienate most of his con- 
temporaries. Even his Latin works, too harshly de- 
scribed by Hallam as *' bellowing in bad Latin," were 
well adapted to the spirit of the age. But nothing like 
his German writings had ever been seen before. In 
lucidity and copiousness of language, in directness and 
vigor, in satire and argument and invective, in humor 
and aptness of illustration and allusion, the numerous 
tracts, political and theological, which poured from his 
pen, surpassed all that had hitherto been written and 
went straight to the hearts of his countrymen. And he 
won his battle almost alone, for Melanchthon, though 
learned and elegant, had no popular gifts, and none of 
his other lieutenants could boast even second-rate 
ability. 

Among his many publications a few only can be sin- German 
gled out for special mention. The continuation of the ™%2 
German Bible undoubtedly helped his cause greatly. 
In many things he could appeal to it against the Ro- 
man tradition, and the very fact that he claimed to do 
so while his opponents by their attitude seemed to 



112 



GERMANY 



Hymns, 
1528 



Catechisms, 
1529 



Church 
government 



shrink from this test, established the Protestant claim 
to be evangelical, in the eyes of the people. Next came 
his hymns, many popular, some good and one really 
great. Ein' feste Burg has been well called by Heine 
the Marseillaise of the Reformation. The Longer and 
Shorter Catechisms educated the common people in 
the evangelical doctrine so well that the Catholics were 
forced to imitate their enemy, though tardily, by com- 
posing, for the first time, catechisms of their own. 

Having overthrown much of the doctrine and dis- 
cipline of the old church Luther addressed himself 
with admirable vigor and great success to the task of 
building up a substitute for it. In this the combina- 
tion of the conservative and at the same time thor- 
oughly popular spirit of the movement manifested it- 
self. Li divine service the vernacular was substituted 
for Latin. New emphasis was placed upon preaching, 
Bible-reading and hymn-singing. Mass was no longer 
incomprehensible, but v/as an act of worship in which 
all could intelligently participate; bread and wine 
were both given to the laity, and those words of the 
canon implying transubstantiation and sacrifice were 
omitted. Marriage was relegated from the rank of a 
sacrament to that of a civil contract. Baptism was 
kept in the old form, even to the detail of exorcizing 
the evil spirit. Auricular confession was permitted 
but not insisted upon. 

The problems of church government and organiza- 
tion were pressing. Two alternatives were theoret- 
ically possible, Congregationalism or state churches. 
After some hesitation, Luther was convinced by the 
extravagances of Miinzer and his ilk that the latter 
was the only practicable course. The governments of 
the various German states and cities were now given 
supreme power in ©cclegiastical matters. They took 
over the property belonging to the old church and ad- 



THE PROTESTANT PARTY 113 

ministered it generally for religious or educational or 
charitable purposes. A system of church-visitation 
was started, by which the central authority passed 
upon the competence of each minister. Powers of ap- 
pointment and removal were vested in the government. 
The title and office of bishop were changed in most 
cases to that of ''superintendent," though in some 
German sees and generally in Sweden the name bishop 
j was retained. 

How genuinely popular was the Lutheran movement Lutheran 
may be seen in the fact that the free cities, Nuremberg, 
Augsburg, Strassburg, Ulm, Liibeck, Hamburg, and 
many others, were the first to revolt from Rome. In 
other states the government led the way. Electoral 
Saxony evolved slowly into complete Protestantism. 
Though the Elector Frederic sympathized with almost 
everything advanced by his great subject, he was too 
cautious to interfere with vested interests of ecclesias- 
tical property and endowments. On his death his ^J^^'^' 
brother John succeeded to the title, and came out 
openly for all the reforms advocated at Wittenberg. 
The neighboring state of Hesse was won about 1524, 
though the official ordinance promulgating the evan- ^^24-5 
gelical doctrine was not issued until 1526. A very im- 
portant acquisition was Prussia. Hitherto it had been ^^-^ 
governed by the Teutonic Order, a military society 
like the Knights Templars. Albert of Brandenburg- 
became Grand Master in 1511, and fourteen years Albert of 
later saw the opportunity of aggrandizing his personal burg,i490- 
power by renouncing his spiritual ties. He accord- 1568 
ingly declared the Teutonic Order abolished and him- 
self temporal Duke of Prussia, shortly afterwards 
marrjdng a daughter of the king of Denmark. He 
swore allegiance to the king of Poland. 

The growth of Lutheranism unmolested by the im- 
perial government was made possible by the absorp- 



114 GEEMANY 

tion of the emperor's energies in his rivalry with 
France and Turkey and by the decentralization of the 
Leagues Empire. Leagues between groups of German states 
had been quite common in the past, and a new stimulus 
to their formation was given by the common religious 
interest. The first league of this sort was that of 

1524 Eatisbon, between Bavaria and other South German 
principalities; its purpose was to carry out the Edict 
of Worms. This was followed by a similar league 

1525 in North Germany between Catholic states, known as 
the League of Dessau, and a Protestant confederation 
known as the League of Torgau. 

Diet of The Diet held at Spires in the summer of 1526 wit- 

152?^' nessed the strength of the new party, for in it the two 
sides treated on equal terms. Many reforms were 
proposed, and some carried through against the ob- 
struction by Ferdinand, the emperor's brother and 
lieutenant. The great question was the enforcement 
of the Edict of Worms, and on this the Diet passed an 
act, knoAvn as a Eecess, providing that each state 
should act in matters of faith as it could answer to God 
and the emperor. In effect this allowed the govern- 
ment of every German state to choose between the two 
confessions, thus anticipating the principle of the Ee- 
ligious Peace of Augsburg of 1555. 

The relations of the two parties were so delicate 
that it seemed as if a general religious war were im- 
minent. In 1528 this was almost precipitated by a 
certain Otto von Pack, who assured the Landgrave of 
Hesse that he had found a treaty between the Catholic 
princes for the extirpation of the Lutherans and for 
the expropriation of their champions, the Elector of 
Saxony and Philip of Hesse himself. This was false, 
but the landgrave armed and attacked the Bishops of 
Wiirzburg and Bamberg, named by Pack as parties to 
the treaty, and he forced them to pay an indemnity. 



THE PEOTESTANT PAETY 115 

The Diet which met at Spires early in 1529 endeav- Recess of 
ored to deal as drastically as possible with the schism, 1529^^' 
The Eecess passed by the Catholic majority on April 
7 was most unfavorable to the Eeformers, repeaUng 
the Eecess of the last Diet in their favor. Catholic 
states were commanded to execute the persecuting 
Edict of Worms, although Lutheran states were for- 
bidden to abolish the office of the (Catholic) mass, 
and also to allow any further innovations in their own 
doctrines or practices until the calling of a general 
council. The princes were forbidden to harbor the 
subjects of another state. The Evangelical members 
of the Diet, much aggrieved at this blow to their faith. Protest, 
published a Protest taking the ground that the Eecess p" ^^ 
of 1526 had been in the nature of a treaty and could 
not be abrogated without the consent of both par- 
ties to it. As the government of Germany was a 
federal one, this was a question of ''states' rights," 
such as came up in our own Civil War, but in the Ger- 
man case it was even harder to decide because there 
was no written Constitution defining the powers of the 
national government and the states. It might nat- 
urally be assumed that the Diet had the power to re- 
13eal its own acts, but the Evangelical estates made a April 25 
further point in their appeal to the emperor, by alleg- 
ing that the Eecess of 1526 had been passed unani- 
mously and could only be repealed by a unanimous 
vote. The Protest and the appeal were signed by the 
Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, a few 
smaller states, and fourteen free cities. From the Pro- 
test they became immediately known as *'the Protest- 
ing Estates," and subsequently the name Protestant 
was given to all those who left the Eoman communion. 



116 GERMANY 

§ 4. The Growth of Protestantism until the 
Death of Luther 

Certain states having announced that they would 
not be bound by the will of the majority, the question 
naturally came up as to how far they would defend 
this position by arms. Luther's advice was asked and 
given to the effect that all rebellion or forcible re- 

1530 ' sistanee to the constituted authorities was wrong. 
Passive resistance, the mere refusal to obey the com- 
mand to persecute or to act otherwise contrary to 
God's law, he thought was right, but he discounte- 
nanced any other measures, even those taken in self- 
defence. All Germans, said he, were the emperor's 
subjects, and the princes should not shield Luther from 
him, but leave their lands open to his officers to do 
what they pleased. This position Luther abandoned a 
year later, when the jurists pointed out to him that 
the authority of the emperor was not despotic but was 
limited by law. 

The Protest and Appeal of 1529 at last aroused 
Charles, slow as he was, to the great dangers to him- 
self that lurked in the Protestant schism. Having re- 
pulsed the Turk and having made peace with France 
and the pope he was at last in a position to address 
himself seriously to the religious problem. Fully in- 
tending to settle the trouble once for all, he came to 

June 20, Germany and opened a Diet at Augsburg to which 
were invited not only the representatives of the vari- 
ous states but a number of leading theologians, both 
Catholic and Lutheran, all except Luther himself, an 
outlaw by the Edict of Worms. 

The first action taken was to ask the Lutherans to 
state their position and this was done in the famous 

June 25 Augsburg Confession, read before the Diet by the 
Saxon Chancellor Briick. It had been drawn up by 



thon 



UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER 117 

Melanchthon in language as near as possible to that 
of the old church. Indeed it undertook to prove that 
there was in the Lutheran doctrine ''nothing repug- 
nant to Scripture or to the Catholic church or to the 
Roman church." Even in the form of the Confession 
published 1531 this Catholicizing tendency is marked, 
but in the original, now lost, it was probably stronger. 
The reason of this was not, as generally stated, Me- 
lanchthon 's ''gentleness" and desire to conciliate all 
parties, for ho showed himself more truculent to the 
Zwinglians and Anabaptists than did Luther. It was 
due to the fact that ]\fclanchthon was at heart half a Meianch- 
Catholic, so much so, indeed, that Contarini and others 
thought it quite possible that ho might come over to 
them. In the present instance ho made his doctrine 
conform to the Roman tenets to such an extent that 
(in the lost original, as we may judge by the Confuta- 
tion) even transubstantiation was in a manner ac- 
cepted. The first part of the Confession is a creed; 
the second part takes up certain abuses, or reforms, 
namely : the demand of the cup for the laity, the mar- 
riage of priests, the mass, as an oints operatum or as 
celebrated privately, fasting and traditions, monastic 
vows and the power of the pope. 

But the concessions did not satisfy the Catholics. 
A Refutation was prepared by Eck and others and 
read before the Diet on August 3. Negotiations con- 
tinued and still further concessions were wrung from 
Melanchthon, concessions of so dangerous a nature 
that his fellow-Protestants denounced him as an enemy 
of the faith and appealed to Luther against him. Me- 
lanchthon had agreed to call the mass a sacrifice, if the 
word were qualified by the term "commemorative," 
and also promised that the bishops should be restored 
to their ancient jurisdictions, a measure justified by 
him as a blow at turbulent sectaries but one also most 



118 



GERMANY 



September 
22 



League of 

Schmal- 

kalden 



July 23, 
1532 



Liibeck, 
1533-1535 



perilous to Lutherans. On the other hand, Eck made 
some concessions, mostly verbal, about the doctrine of 
justification and other points. 

That with this mutually conciliatory spirit an agree- 
ment failed to materialize only proved how irreconcil- 
able were thp aims of the two parties. The Diet voted 
that the Confession had been refuted and that the 
Protestants were bound to recant. The emperor 
promised to use his influence with the pope to call a 
general council to decide doubtful points, but if the 
Lutherans did not return to the papal church by April 
15, 1531, they were threatened with coercion. 

To meet this perilous situation a closer alliance was 
formed by the Protestant states at Schmalkalden in 
February 1531. This league constantly grew by the 
admission of new members, but some attempts to unite 
with the Swiss proved abortive. 

On January 5, 1531, Ferdinand was elected King of 
the Eomans — the title taken by the heir to the Empire 
— by six of the electors against the vote of Saxony. 
Three months later when the time granted the Lu- 
therans expired, the Catholics were unable to do any- 
thing, and negotiations continued. These resulted in 
the Peace of Nuremberg, a truce until a general coun- 
cil should be called. It was an important victory for 
the Lutherans, who were thus given time in which to 
grow. 

The seething unrest which found expression in the 
rebellion of the knights, of the peasants and of the 
Anabaptists at Miinster, has been described. One 
more liberal movement, which also failed, must be 
mentioned at this time. It was as little connected with 
religion as anything in that theological age could be. 
The city of Liibeck, under its burgomaster George 
Wullenwever, tried to free itself from the influence of 
Denmark and at the same time to get a more popular 



UNTIL TTTK DEATH OF LUTHER 119 

^efovemment. In 1536 it was conquered by Christian 
III of Denmark, and the old aristocratic constitution 
restored. The time was not ripe for the people to 
assert its rights in North Germany. 

The growth of Protestantism was at times assisted May, 1534 
by force of arms. Thus, Philip of Hesse restored the 
now Protestant Duke Ulrich of Wiirttemberg, who 
had been expelled for his tyranny by the Swabian 
League fifteen years before. This triumph was the 
more marked because the expropriated ruler was Fer- 
dinand, King of the Romans. If in such cases it was 
the government which took the lead, in others the 
government undoubtedly compelled the people to con- 
tinue Catholic even when there was a strongly Prot- 
estant public opinion. Such was the case in Alber- 
tine Saxony,^ whoso ruler, Duke George, though an 
estimable man in many ways, was regarded by Luther 
as the instrument of Satan because he persecuted his 
Protestant subjects. When he died, his brother, the April, 1539 
Protestant Henry the Pious, succeeded and introduced 
the Reform amid general acclamation. Two years 
later this duke was followed by his son, the versatile 
but treacherous Maurice. In the year 1539 a still 
greater acquisition came to the Schmalkaldic League 
in the conversion of Brandenburg and its Elector 
Joachim II, 

Shortly afterwards the world was scandalized by Philip of 
the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. This prince was ut- 150^7 
terly spoiled by his accession to the governing power 
at the age of fifteen. Though he lived in flagrant im- 
morality, his religion, which, soon after he met Luther 
at Worms, became the Evangelical, was real enough to 
make his sins a burden to conscience. Much attracted 

1 Saxony had been divided in 1485 into two parts, the Electorate, in- 
cluding Wittenberg, Weimar and Eisenach, and the Duchy, including 
Leipzig and Dresden. The former was called after its first ruler Ernes- 
tine, the latter Albertine. 



120 GEEMANY 

by the teachings of some of the Anabaptists and Carl- 
stadt that polygamy was lawful, and by Luther's as- 
sertion in the Babylonian Captivity that it was pre- 

1526 ferable to divorce, he begged to be allowed to take 

more wives, but was at first refused. His conscience 
was quickened by an attack of the syphilis in 1539, and 
at that time he asked permission to take a second wife 
and received it, on December 10, from Luther, Me- 
lanchthon, and Bucer. His secret marriage to Mar- 

1540^ ' gai*et von der Saal took place in the presence of 
Melanehthon, Bucer, and other divines. Luther ad- 
vised him to keep the matter secret and if necessary 
even to '^tell a good strong lie for the sake and good 
of the Christian church." Of course he was unable 
to conceal his act, and his conduct, and that of his 
spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to the cause. 
As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip 
might have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have 
said that ''nothing was lost but honor." Neither Ger- 
many nor Hesse nor the Protestant church suffered 
directly by his act. Indeed it lead indirectly to an- 
other territorial gain. Philip's enemy Duke Henry of 
Brunswick, though equally immoral, attacked him in a 
pamphlet. Luther answered this in a tract of the 
utmost violence, called Jack Sausage. Henry's re- 
joinder was followed by war between him and the 
Schmalkaldic princes, in which he was expelled from 
his dominions and the Reformation introduced. 

1541 Further gains followed rapidly. The Catholic Bishop 

of Naumburg was expelled by John Frederic of Sax- 
ony, and a Lutheran bishop instituted instead. About 
the same time the great spiritual prince, Hermann 
von Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, became a 
Protestant, and invited Melanehthon and Bucer to re- 
form his territories. One of the last gains, before the 
Schmalkaldic war, was the Rhenish Palatinate, under 



1541 



UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER 121 

its Elector Frederic III. His troops fought then on 1545 
the Protestant side, though later he turned against 
that church. 

The opportunity of the Lutherans was due to the en- 
gagements of the emperor with other enemies. In 
1535 Charles undertook a successful expedition against 
Tunis. The war with France simmered on until the 
Truce of Nice, intended to be for ten years, signed be- 
tween the two powers in 1538. In 1544 war broke out 
again, and fortune again favored Charles. He in- 
vaded France almost to the gates of Paris, but did not 
press his advantage and on September 18 signed the 
Peace of Crepy giving up all his conquests. 

Unable to turn his arms against the heretics, Charles 
continued to negotiate with them. The pressure he 
brought to bear upon the pope finally resulted in the 
summoning by Paul III of a council to meet at Mantua J""^ 2, 
the following year. The Protestants were invited to 
send delegates to this council, and the princes of that 
faith held a congress at Schmalkalden to decide on February, 

1537 

their course. Hitherto the Lutherans had called 
themselves a part of the Roman Catholic church and 
had always appealed to a future oecumenical or na- 
tional synod. They now found this position untenable, 
and returned the papal citation unopened. Instead, 
demands for reform, known as the Schmalkaldic Arti- 
cles, were dra\\Ti up by Luther. The four principal 
demands were (1) recognition of the doctrine of justi- 
fication by faith only, (2) abolition of the mass as a 
good work or opus operaUnn, (3) alienation of the 
foundations for private masses, (4) removal of the 
pretentions of the pope to headship of the universal 
church. As a matter of fact the council was post- 
poned. 

Failing to reach a permanent solution by this April 19, 

1539 

method, Charles was again forced to negotiate. The 



122 GEE.MANY 

Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce varying in 
length from six to fifteen months according to circum- 
stances. This was followed by a series of religious 

Religious conferences with the purpose of finding some means 

oquies ^^ reconciling the two confessions. Among the first 

of these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau. 

1540-1 Campeggio and Eck were the Catholic leaders, Me- 
lanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans. Each 
side had eleven members on the commission, but their 
joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the 
papal power and on the doctrine of original sin. 
When the Diet of Ratisbon was opened in the spring of 
1541 a further conference was held at which the two 
parties came closer to each other than they had done 
since Augsburg. The Book of Ratisbon was drawn 
'' up, emphasizing the points of agreement and slurring 
over the differences. Contarini made wide conces- 
sions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doc- 
trine of justification. Discussion of the nature of the 
church, the power of the pope, the invocation of saints, 
the mass, and sacerdotal celibacy seemed likely to re- 
sult in some modus vivendi. '\^niat finally shattered 
the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstan- 
tiation and the adoration of the host. As Contarini 
had found in the statements of the Augsburg Confes- 
sion no insuperable obstacle to an understanding he 
was astonished at the stress laid on them by the Prot- 
estants now. 

1542 It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet 

of Spires should have avoided the religious question 
and have devoted itself to more secular matters, 
among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to 
fight the Turk. Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Es- 
tates act under the wrath of God. Religion is rele- 
gated to an agreement between cities. . . . The cause 
of our evils is that few seek the Lord earnestly, but 



UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER 123 

most -fight against him, both among those who have re- 
jected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke." 
At the Diet of Spires two years later the emperor 
promised the Protestants, in return for help against 
France, recognition until a German National Council 
should be called. For this concession he was sharply 
rebuked by the pope. The Diet of Worms contented 1545 
itself with expressing its general hope for a "Chris- 
tian reformation." 

During his later years Luther's polemic never 1545 
flagged. His last book. Against the Papacy of Ro7ne, 
founded by the Devil, surpassed Cicero and the human- 
ists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of 
its invective against 'Hhe most hellish father, St. Paul, 
or Paula III ' ' and his * ' hellish Roman church. " " One 
would like to curse them, ' ' he wrote, ' ' so that thunder 
and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, 
the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, car- 
buncles, and all diseases attack them" — and so on for 
page after page. Of course such lack of restraint 
largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer 
Bullinger called it ''amazingly violent," and a book 
than which he "had never read anything more savage 
or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered 
by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last 
years from a nervous malady and from other painful 
diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, 
partly to the quantities of alcohol he imbibed, though 
he never became intoxicated. 

Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were 
his happiest ones. His wife, Catherine von Bora, 
an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happi- 
ness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty June 13, 
of openings for reviling him as an apostate, and ^^^^ 
though it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that 
what had begun as a tragedy ended as a comedy, it 



124 



GERMANY 



Death and 
character 
of Luther 



crowned his career, symbolizing the return from medi- 
eval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in 
the fine old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality 
many poor relatives, famous strangers, and students, 
notwithstanding unremitting toil and not a little bodily 
suffering, he expanded in his whole nature, mellowing 
in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily 
routine is known to us intimately through the adoring 
assiduity of his disciples, who noted do^vn whole vol- 
umes of his Table Talk. 

On Febrary 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the 
work that he accomplished and by the impression that 
his personality made both on contemporaries and on 
posterity, there are few men like him in history. 
Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and 
violent as he was, he yet had that inscrutable preroga- 
tive of genius of transforming what he touched into 
new values. His contemporaries bore his invective 
because of his earnestness; they bowed to ''the almost 
disgraceful servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he 
imposed upon his followers, because they knew that he 
was leading them to victory in a great and worthy 
cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrow- 
ness and bigotry because of his genius and bravery. 

His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and pub- 
lic man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or 
cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intoler- 
able, the abomination of desolation standing where it 
ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of 
his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole 
truth, as he saw it, ''despite all cardinals, popes, kings 
and emperors, together with all devils and hell." 
Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring 
and his strength to labor for it must command our 
respect. 

Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a 



UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER 125 

wonderful gift of language that made him the tongue, His 
as well as the spear-point, of his people. Li love of ^°^"^°** 
nature, in Avonder, in the power to voice some secret 
truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he was a poet. He 
looked out on the stars and considered the "good mas- 
ter-workman" that made them, on the violets *'for 
which neither the Grand Turk nor the emperor could 
pay," on the yearly growth of corn and wine, ''as 
great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on 
the "pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowl- 
er's net, or holding a Diet "in a hall roofed with the 
vault of heaven, carpeted wuth the grass, and with walls 
as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to his 
son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where 
good children eat apples and pears and cherries and 
plums, and where they ride on pretty ponies with 
golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day and 
play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows. 

Luther's character combined traits not usually 
found in the same nature. He was both a dreamy 
mystic and a practical man of affairs ; he saw visions 
and he knew how^ to make them realities; he was a 
Hod-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and 
liard worker for results. His faith was as simple and 
])assionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often 
sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with 
liorserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child 
as only a woman can. His hj^mns soar to heaven and 
his coarse jests trail in the mire. He was touched 
with profound melancholy and yet he had a whole- 
some, ready laugh. His words are now brutal in- 
vectives and again blossom with the most exquisite 
flowers of the soul — poetry, music, idyllic humor, ten- 
derness. He was subtle and simple ; superstitious and 
wise; limited in his cultural sympathies, but very 
great in what he achieved. 



126 GEEMANY 

§ 5. The Religious War and the Religious 
Peace 

Hardly had Luther been laid to rest when the first 
general religious war broke out in Germany. There 
had been a few small wars of this character before, 
such as those of Hesse against Bamberg and Wiirz- 
burg, and against Wiirttemberg, and against Bruns- 
wick. But the conflicts had been successfully ''local- 
ized." Now at last was to come a general battle, as 
a foretaste of the Thirty Years War of the next cen- 
tury. 

It has sometimes been doubted whether the Schmal- 
kaldic War was a religious conflict at all. The em- 
peror asserted that his sole object was to reduce 
rebellious subjects to obedience. Several Protestant 
princes were his allies, and the territories he con- 
quered were not, for the most part, forced to give up 
their faith. Nevertheless, it is certain that the funda- 
mental cause of the strain was the difference of creed. 
A parallel may be found in our own Civil War, in 
which Lincoln truly claimed that he was fighting only 
to maintain the union, and yet it is certain that slavery 
furnished the underlying cause of the appeal to arms. 

It has recently been shown that the emperor planned 
the attack on his Protestant subjects as far back, at 
least, as 1541. All the negotiations subsequent to that 
time were a mere blind to disguise his preparations. 
For he labored indefatigably to bring about a condi- 
tion in which it would be safe for him to embark on 
the perilous enterprise. Though he was a dull man he 
had the two qualities of caution and persistence that 
stood him in better stead than the more showy talents 
of other statesmen. If, with his huge resources, he 
never did anything brilliant, still less did he ever take 
a gambler's chance of failing. 



THE EELIGIOUS WAR 127 

The opportune moment came at last in the spring of 
1546. Two years before, he had beaten France with 
the help of the Protestants, and had imposed upon her 
as one condition of peace that she should make no 
allies within the Empire. In November of the same 
year he made an alliance with Paul III, receiving 
200,000 ducats in support of his effort to extirpate 
the heresy. 

Other considerations impelled him to attack at once. 
The secession of Cologne and the Palatinate from the 
Catholic communion gave the Protestants a majority 
in the Electoral College. Still more decisive was it 
that Charles was able at this time by playing upon the 
jealousies and ambitions of the states, to secure im- 
portant allies within the Empire, including some of 
the Protestant faith. First, Catholic Bavaria forgot 
her hatred of Austria far enough to make common 
cause against the heretics. Then, two great Protes- 
tant princes, Maurice of Albertine Saxony and John 
von Kiistrin — a brother of Joachim II, Elector of 
[Brandenburg — abandoned their coreligionists and bar- 
tered support to the emperor in return for promises 
of aggrandizement. 

A final religious conference held at Eatisbon demon- January, 
strated more clearly than ever the hopelessness of con- 
ciliation. Whereas a semi-Lutheran doctrine of justi- 
fication was adopted, the Protestants prepared two 
long memoirs rejecting the authority of the council 
recently convened at Trent. And then, in the summer, 
war broke out. At this moment the forces of the 
Schmalkaldic League were superior to those of its 
enemies. But for poor leadership and lack of unity 
in command they would probably have won. 

Towards the last of August and early in September 
the Protestant troops bombarded the imperial army 
at Ingolstadt, but failed to follow this up by a decisive 



1546 



128 



GERMANY 



February, 
1547 



October, 
1546 



attack, as was urged by General Schartlin of Augs- 
burg. Lack of equipment was partly responsible for 
this failure. When the emperor advanced, the Elector 
of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse retired each to 
his own land. Another futile attempt of the League 
was a raid on the Tyrol, possibly influenced by the 
desire to strike at the Council of Trent, certainly by 
no sound military policy. The effect of these inde- 
cisive counsels was that Charles had little trouble in 
reducing the South German rebels, Augsburg, Ulm, 
Nuremberg, and Wiirttemberg. The Elector Palatine 
hastened to come to terms by temporarily abandoning 
his religion. A counter-reformation was also effected 
in Cologne. Augsburg bought the emperor's pardon 
by material concessions. 

In the meantime Duke Maurice of Albertine Sax- 
ony, having made a bargain with the emperor, attacked 
his second cousin the Elector. Though Maurice was 
not obliged to abjure his faith, his act was naturally 
regarded as one of signal treachery and he was hence- 
forth known by the nickname ^ ' Judas. ' ' Maurice con- 
quered most of his cousin's lands, except the forts of 
Wittenberg and Gotha. Charles's Spanish army un- 
der Alva now turned northward, forced a passage of 
the Elbe and routed the troops of John Frederic at the 
battle of Miihlberg, near Torgau, on April 24, 1547. 
John Frederic was captured wounded, and kept in 
durance several years. Wittenberg capitulated on 
May 19, and just a month later Philip of Hesse sur- 
rendered at Halle. He also was kept a prisoner for 
some years. Peace was made by the mediation of 
Brandenburg. The electoral vote of Saxony was given 
to Maurice, and with it the best part of John Fred- 
eric's lands, including Wittenberg. No change of re- 
ligion was required. The net result of the War was to 



THE EELIGIOUS WAB 129 

increase the imperial power, but to put a very slight 
check upon the expansion of Protestantism. 

And yet it was for precisely this end that Charles 
chiefly valued his authority. Immediately, acting in- 
dependently of the pope, he made another effort to 
restore the confessional unity of Germany. The Diet 
of Augsburg accepted under pressure from him a do- 1^47-8 
cree called the Interim because it was to be valid only 
until the final decisions of a general council. Though 
intended to apply only to Protestant states — the Cath- 
olics had, instead, a formula reformationis — the In- The 
terim, drawn up by Romanist divines, was naturally j"*^^"^' 
Catholic in tenor. The episcopal constitution was re- 1548 
stored, along with the canon of the mass, the doctrine 
of the seven sacraments, and the worship of saints. 
On some doctrinal points vagueness was studied. The 
only concessions made to the Reformation were the 
pro teynpore recognition of the marriage of the clergy 
and the giving of the cup to the laity. Various other 
details of practical reform were demanded. The In- 
terim was intensely unpopular with both parties. The 
pope objected to it and German Catholics, especially 
in Bavaria, strongly opposed it. The South German 
Protestant states accepted it only under pressure. 
Maurice of Saxony adopted it in a modified form, 
kno^\^l as the Leipzig Interim, in December 1548. The 
assistance rendered him by Melanchthon caused a 
fierce attack on the theologian by his fellow-Lutherans. 
In enforcing the Interim Maurice found his own profit, 
for when Magdeburg won the nickname of ''our Lord 
God's pulpit" by refusing to accept it, Maurice was 
entrusted with the execution of the imperial ban, and 
captured the city on November 9, 1551. 

Germany now fell into a confused condition, every 
state for itself. The emperor found his own difficul- 



130 



GERMANY 



1552 



July 9, 
1553 



Religious 
Peace of 
Augsburg, 
September 
25, 1555 



ties in trying to make his son Philip successor to his 
brother Ferdinand. His two former Protestant allies, 
Maurice and John von Kiistrin, made an alliance with 
France and with other North German princes and 
forced the emperor to conclude the Convention of Pas- 
sau. This guaranteed afresh the religious freedom of 
the Lutherans until the next Diet, and forced the liber- 
ation of John Frederic and Philip of Hesse. Charles 
did not loyally accept the conditions of this agreement, 
but induced Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg-Culm- 
bach, to attack the confederate princes in the rear. 
After Albert had laid waste a portion of North Ger- 
many he was defeated by Maurice at the battle of 
Sievershausen. Mortally wounded, the brilliant but 
utterly unscrupulous victor died, at the age of thirty- 
two, soon after the battle. As the conflict had by this 
time resolved itself into a duel between him and 
Charles, the emperor was now at last able to put 
through, at the Diet of Augsburg, a settlement of the 
religious question. 

The principles of the Religious Peace were as fol- 
lows: 

(1) A truce between states recognizing the Augs- 
burg Confession and Catholic states until union was 
possible. All other confessions were to be barred — a 
provision aimed chiefly at Calvinists. 

(2) The princes and governments of the Free Cities 
were to be allowed to choose between the Roman and 
the Lutheran faith, but their subjects must either con- 
form to this faith — on the maxim famous as cujus 
regio ejus religio — or emigrate. In Imperial Free 
Cities, however, it was specially provided that Cath- 
olic minorities be tolerated. 

(3) The ''ecclesiastical reservation," or principle 
that when a Catholic spiritual prince became Protes- 
tant he should be deposed and a successor appointed 



THE EELIGIOUS PEACE 131 

so that his territory might remain under the church. 
In respect to this Ferdinand privately promised to 
secure toleration for Protestant subjects in the land 
of such a prince. All claims of spiritual jurisdiction 
by Catholic prelates in Lutheran lands were to cease. 
All estates of the church confiscated prior to 1552 were 
to remain in the hands of the spoliators, all seized since 
that date to be restored. 

The Peace of Augsburg, like the Missouri Com- 
promise, only postponed civil war and the radical 
solution of a pressing problem. But as we cannot 
rightly censure the statesmen of 1820 for not insisting 
on emancipation, for which public opinion was not yet 
prepared, so it would be unhistorical and unreasonable 
to blame the Diet of Augsburg for not granting the 
complete toleration which we now see was bound to 
come and was ideally the right thing. Mankind is 
educated slowly and by many hard experiences. Eu- 
rope had lain so long under the domination of an 
authoritative ecclesiastical civilization that the pos- 
sibility of complete toleration hardly occurred to any 
but a few eccentrics. And we must not minimize what 
the Peace of Augsburg actually accomplished. It is 
true that choice of religion was legally limited to two Actual 
alternatives, but this was more than had been allowed 
before. It is true that freedom of even this choice 
was complete only for the rulers of the territories or 
Free Cities; private citizens might exercise the same 
choice only on leaving their homes. The hardship of 
this was somewhat lessened by the consideration that 
in any case the nonconformist would not have to go 
far before finding a German community holding the 
Catholic or Lutheran opinions he preferred. Finally, 
it must be remembered that, if the Peace of Augsburg 
aligned the whole nation into two mutually hostile 
camps, it at least kept them from war for more than 



results 



132 



GERMANY 



1563-7 



Ferdinand, 
1556-64 



Maximilian 
II, 1564-76 

Catholic 
reaction 



half a century. Nor was this a mere accident, for the 
strain was at times severe. When the imperial knight, 
Grumbach, broke the peace by sacking the city of 
Wiirzburg, he was put under the ban, captured and 
executed. His protector, Duke John Frederic of Sax- 
ony, was also captured and kept in confinement in 
Austria until his death. 

Notwithstanding such an exhibition of centralized 
power, it is probable that the Peace of Augsburg in- 
creased rather than diminished the authority of the 
territorial states at the expense of the imperial govern- 
ment. Charles V, worn out by his long and unsuccess- 
ful struggle with heresy, after giving the Netherlands 
to his son Philip in 1555, abdicated the crown of the 
Empire to his brother Ferdinand in 1556. He died two 
years later in a monastery, a disappointed man, hav- 
ing expressed the wish that he had burned Luther at 
Worms. The energies of Ferdinand were largely 
taken up with the Turkish war. His son, Maximilian 
II, was favorably inclined to Protestantism. 

Before Maximilian's death, however, a reaction in 
favor of Catholicism had already set in. The last im- 
portant gains to the Lutheran cause in Germany came 
in the years immediately following the Peace of Augs- 
burg. Nothing is more remarkable than the fact that 
practically all the conquests of Protestantism in Eu- 
rope were made within the first half century of its exist- 
ence. After that for a few years it lost, and since then 
has remained, geographically speaking, stationary in 
Europe. It is impossible to get accurate statistics of 
the gains and losses of either confession. The estimate 
of the Venetian ambassador that only one-tenth of 
the German empire was Catholic in 1558 is certainly 
wrong. In 1570, at the height of the Protestant tide, 
probably 70 per cent, of Germans — including Aus- 
trians — were Protestant. In 1910 the Germans of the 



schisms 



1560 



THE EELIGIOUS PEACE 133 

German Empire and of Austria were divided thus: 
Protestants 37,675,000 ; Catholics 29,700,000. The 
Protestants were about 56 per cent., and this propor- 
tion was probably about that of the j^ear 1600. 

Historically, the final stemming of the Protestant Lutheran 
flood was due to the revival of energy in the Catholic 
Church and to the internal weakness and schism of the 
Protestants, Even within the Lutheran communion 
fierce conflicts broke out. Luther's lieutenants fought 
for his spiritual heritage as the generals of Alexander 
fought for his empire. The center of these storms was 
Melanchthon until death freed him from ''the rage of ^^n^^' 
the theologians." Always half Catholic, half Eras- 
mian at heart, by his endorsement of the Interim, and 
by his severe criticisms of his former friends Luther 
and John Frederic, he brought on himself the bitter 
enmity of those calling themselves ''Gnesio-Luther- 
ans," or "Genuine Lutherans." Melanchthon abol- 
ished congregational hymn-singing, and published his 
true views, hitherto dissembled, on predestination and 
the sacrament. He was attacked by Flacius the his- 
torian, and by many others. The dispute was taken 
up by still others and went to such lengths that for a 
minor heresy a pastor, Funck, was executed by his 
fellow-Lutherans in Prussia, in 1566. ''Philippism" 
as it was called, at first grew, but finally collapsed 
when the Formula of Concord was drawn up in 1580 
and signed by over 8000 clergy. This document is to 
the Lutheran Church what the decrees of Trent were to 
the Catholics. The ''high" doctrine of the real pres- 
ence was strongly stated, and all the sophistries ad- 
vanced to support it canonized. The sacramental 
bread and wine were treated mth such superstitious 
reverence that a Lutheran priest who accidentally 
spilled the latter was punished by having his fingers 
cut off. Melanchthon was against such "remnants of 



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136 



SCANDINAVIA 



great aggrandizement of the power of the prelates and 
of the larger nobles at the expense of the bonder, who, 
from a class of free and noble small proprietors de- 
generated not only into peasants but often into serfs. 
When Christian II succeeded to the throne, it was as 
the papal champion. His attempt to consolidate his 
power in Sweden by massacring the magnates under 
the pretext that they were hostile to the pope, an act 
called the ''Stockholm bath of blood," aroused the 
people against him in a war of independence. 

Christian found Denmark also insubordinate. It is 
true that he made some just laws, protecting the people 
and building up their prosperity, but their support 
was insufficient to counterbalance the hatred of the 
great lords spiritual and temporal. He was quick to 
see in the Reformation a weapon against the prelates, 
and appealed for help to Wittenberg as early as 1519. 
His endeavors throughout 1520 to get Luther himself 
to visit Denmark failed, but early in 1521 he suc- 
ceeded in attracting Carlstadt for a short visit. This 
effort, however, cost him his throne, for he was ex- 
pelled on April 13, 1523, and wandered over Europe 
in exile until his death. 

The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, to whom the crown 
was offered, reigned for ten years as Frederic I. 
Though his coronation oath bound him to do nothing 
against the church, he had only been king for three 
years before he came out openly for the Reformation. 
In this again we must see primarily a policy, rather 
than a conviction. He was supported, however, by the 
common people, who had been disgusted by the indul- 
gences sold by Arcimboldi and by the constant corrupt- 
tion of the higher clergy. The cities, as in Germany, 
were the strongest centers of the movement. The Diet 
of 1527 decreed that Lutherans should be recognized 
on equal terms with Catholics, that marriage of priests 



SCANDINAVIA 137 

and the regular clergy be allowed. In 1530 a Lutheran 
confession was adopted. 

Christian III, who reigned until 1559, took the final 
step, though at the price of a civil war. His victory 
enabled him to arrest all the bishops, August 20, 1536, 
and to force them to renounce their rights and proper- 
ties in favor of the cro^vn. Only one, Bishop Ronnow 
of Roskilde, refused, and was consequently held pris- 
oner until his death. The Diet of 1536 abolished Cath- 
olicism, confiscated all church property and distrib- 
uted it between the king and the temporal nobles. 
Bugenhagen was called from Wittenberg to organize 
the church on Lutheran lines. In the immediately f ol- 1537-9 
lowing years the Catholics were deprived of their civil 
rights. The political benefits of the Reformation 
inured primarily to the king and secondarily to the 
third estate. 

Norway was a vassal of Denmark from 1380 till Norway 
1814. At no time was its dependence more complete 
than in the sixteenth century. Frederic I introduced 
the Reformation by royal decree as early as 1528, and 
Christian III put the northern kingdom completely 
Tinder the tutelage of Denmark, in spiritual as well as 
in temporal matters. The adoption of the Reforma- 
tion here as in Iceland seemed to be a matter of popu- 
lar indifference. 

After Sweden had asserted her independence by the Sweden 
expulsion of Christian II, Gustavus Vasa, an able y"^^^^"^ 
ruler, ascended the throne. He, too, saw in the Ref- 1523^0 
ormation chiefly an opportunity for confiscating the 
goods of the church. The way had, indeed, been pre- 
pared by a popular reformer, Olaus Petri, but the king 
made the movement an excuse to concentrate in his 
own hands the spiritual power. The Diet of Westeras 
passed the necessary laws, at the same time expelling 
the chief leader of the Romanist party, John Brask, 



1536 



1527 



138 



POLAND 



Bishop of Linkoping. The Reformation was entirely 
Lutheran and extremely conservative. Not only the 
Anabaptists, but even the Calvinists, failed to get any 
hold upon the Scandinavian peoples. In many ways 
the Reformation in Sweden was parallel to that in 
England. Both countries retained the episcopal or- 
ganization founded upon the ''apostolical succession." 
Olaus Magni, Bishop of Westeras, had been ordained 
at Rome in 1524, and in turn consecrated the first 
Evangelical Archbishop, Lawrence Petri, who had 
studied at Wittenberg, and who later translated the 
Bible into Swedish and protected his people from the 
inroads of Calvinism. The king, more and more ab- 
solutely the head of the church, as in England, did not 
hesitate to punish even prominent reformers when 
they opposed him. The reign of Gustavus's succes- 
sor, Eric XIV, was characterless, save for the influx 
of Huguenots strengthening the Protestants. King 
John III made a final, though futile, attempt to reunite 
with the Roman Church. As Finland was at this time 
a dependency of Sweden, the Reformation took prac- 
tically the same course as in Sweden itself. 

A complete contrast to Sweden is furnished by 
Poland. If in the former the government counted for 
almost everything, in the latter it counted for next to 
nothing. The theater of Polish history is the vast 
plain extending from the Carpathians to the Diina, 
and from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and the 
Sea of Azov. This region, lacking natural frontiers 
on several sides, was inhabited by a variety of races : 
Poles in the west, Lithuanians in the east, Ruthenians 
in the south and many Germans in the cities. The 
union of the Polish and Lithuanian states was as yet 
a merely personal one in the monarch. Since the 
fourteenth century the crown of Poland had been elec- 
tive, but the grand-ducal crown of Lithuania was he- 



POLAND 139 

reditary in the famous house of Jagiello, and the 
advantages of union induced the Polish nobility regu- 
larly to elect the heir to the eastern domain their king. 
Though theoretically absolute, in practice the king had 
been limited by the power of the nobles and gentry, and 
this limitation was given a constitutional sanction in 
the law Nihil novi, forbidding the monarch to pass 1505 
laws without the consent of the deputies of the mag- 
nates and lesser nobles. 

The foreign policy of Sigismund I was determined . Sigismund 
by the proximity of powerful and generally hostile 
neighbors. It would not be profitable in this place to 
follow at length the story of his frequent wars with 
Muscovy and with the Tartar hordes of the Crimea, and 
of his diplomatic struggles with the Turks, the Em- 
pire, Hungary, and Sweden. On the whole he suc- 
ceeded not only in holding his own, but in augmenting 
his power. He it was who finally settled the vexatious 
question of the relationship of his crown to the Teu- 
tonic Order, which, since 1466, had held Prussia as a 
fief, though a constantly rebellious and troublesome 
one. The election of Albert of Brandenburg as Grand 
Master of the Order threatened more serious trouble, ^^^^ 
but a satisfactory solution of the problem was found 
when Albert embraced the Lutheran faith and secular- 
ized Prussia as an hereditary duchy, at the same time 
swearing allegiance to Sigismund as his suzerain. 1^25 
Many years later Sigismund 's son conquered and an- 
nexed another domain of the Teutonic order further 
north, namely Livonia. War with Sweden resulted ^^^^ 
from this but was settled by the cession of Esthonia 
to the Scandinavian power. 

Internally, the vigorous Jagiello strengthened both 
the military and financial resources of his people. To 
meet the constant inroads of the Tartars he established 
the Cossacks, a rough cavalry fonned of the hunters, 



140 POLAND 

fishers, and graziers of the Ukraine, quite analogous 
to the cowboys of the American Wild West. From 
being a military body they developed into a state and 
nation that occupied a special position in Poland and 
then in Russia. Sigismund's fiscal policy, by recover- 
ing control of the mint and putting the treasury into 
the hands of capable bankers, effectively provided for 
the economic life of the government. 

Poland has generally been as open to the inroads 
of foreign ideas as to the attacks of enemies ; a peculiar 
susceptibility to alien culture, due partly to the lin- 
guistic attainments of many educated Poles and partly 
to an independent, almost anarchical disposition, has 
made this nation receive from other lands more freely 
than it gives. Every wave of new ideas innundates 
the low-lying plain of the Vistula. So the Reforma- 
tion spread with amazing rapidity, first among the 
cities and then among the peasants of that land. In 
the fifteenth century the influence of Huss and the hu- 
manists had in different ways formed channels facil- 
itating the inrush of Lutheranism. The unpopularity 
of a wealthy and indolent church predisposed the body 
politic to the new infection. Danzig, that "Venice of 
the North," had a Lutheran preacher in 1518; while 
the Edict of Thorn, intended to suppress the heretics, 
indicates that as early as 1520 they had attracted the 
attention of the central government. But this perse- 
cuting measure, followed thick and fast by others, only 
proved how little the tide could be stemmed by paper 
barriers. The cities of Cracow, Posen, and Lublin, 
especially susceptible on account of their German 
population, were thoroughly infected before 1522. 
Next, the contagion attacked the country districts and 
towns of Prussia, which had been pretty thoroughly 
converted prior to its secularization. 

The first political effect of the Reformation was to 



POLAND 141 

stimulate the unrest of the lower classes. Eiots and 
rebellions, analogous to those of the Peasants' War in 
Germany, followed hard -upon the preaching of the 
''gospel." Sigismund could restore order here and 
there, as he did at Danzig in 1526 by a military occu- 
pation, by fining the towTi and beheading her six lead- 
ing innovators, but he could not suppress the growing 
movement. For after the accession of the lower 
classes came that of the nobles and gentry who bore 
the real sovereignty in the state. Seeing in the Re- 
formation a weapon for humiliating and plundering 
the church, as well as a key to a higher spiritual life, 
from one motive or the other, they flocked to its stand- 
ard, and, under leadership of their greatest reformer, 
John La ski, organized a jDowerful church. 

The reign of Sigismund II saw the social upheaval sigismund 
by which the nobility finally placed the power firmly in ^^^^2 
their own hands, and also the height of the Eeforma- 
tion. By a law known as the ''Execution" the assem- 
bly of nobles finally got control of the executive as 
well as of the legislative branch of the government. 
At the same time they, with the cordial assistance of 
the king, bound the country together in a closer bond 
known as the Union of Lublin. Though Lithuania and 1569 
Prussia struggled against incorporation with Poland, 
both were forced to submit to a measure that added 
power to the state and opened to the Polish nobility 
great opportunity for political and economic exploita- 
tion of these lands. Not only the king, but the mag- 
nates and the cities were put under the heel of the 
ruling caste. This was an evolution opposite to that 
of most European states, in w^hich crown and bour- 
geoisie subdued the once proud position of the baron- 
age. But even here in Poland one sees the rising 
influence of commerce and the money-power, in that 
the Polish nobility was largely composed of small 



1S48 



142 POLAND 

gentry eager and able to exploit the new opportimities 
offered by capitalism. In other countries the old 
privilege of the sword gave way to the new privilege 
of gold: in Poland the sword itself tamed golden, at 
least in part : the blade kept its keen, steel edge, but 
the hilt by which it was wielded glittered yellow. 

Protestant- Unchecked though they were by laws, the Protes- 

*^ tants soon developed a weakness that finally proved 

fatal to their cause, laci of organization and division 

1537 into many mutually hostile sects. The Anabaptists 

of course arrived, preached, gained adherents, and 
were suppressed. Next came a large influx of Bo- 
hemian Brethren, expelled from their own country and 
migrating to a land of freedom, where they soon made 
co m mon cause with the Lutherans. Calvinists propa- 

1558 gated the seeds of their faith with much success. 

Finally the Unitarians, led by Lelio Sozini, found a 
home in Poland and made many proselytes, at last be- 
coming so powerful that they founded the new city of 
Bacau, whence issued the famous Eacovian Cate- 
rbism. At one time they seemed about to obtain the 
mastery of the state, but the firm union of the Trini- 

1570 tarian Protestants at Sandomir checked them until all 

of them were swept away together by the resurging 
tide of Catholicism. Several versions of the Bible, 
Lutheran, Socinian, and Catholic, were issued. 

So powerful were the Evangelicals that at the Diet 
of 1555 they held services in the face of the Catholic 
king, and passed a law abohshing the jurisdiction of 
the ecclesiastical courts. This measure, of course, 
allowed freedom of all new sects, both those then in 
control of the Diet and the as yet unfledged Anti- 
trinitarians. Nevertheless a strong wish was ex- 
pressed for a national. Protestant church, and had 
Sigismund had the advantages, as he had the matri- 
monial difficulties, of Henry Mil, he might have es- 



POLAXD 143 

tablished snch a body. But he never qnite dared to 
take the step, dreading the hostility of Catholic nei|^- 
bors. SingnlarlT enough the championship of the 
Catholic cause was undertaken by Greek-Catholic Mus- 
covy, whose Czar, Ivan, represented his war against ^^^ 
Poland as a crusade against the new iconoclasts. Un- 
able to act with power, SigLsmund cultivated such 
means of combating Protestantism as were ready to 
his hand. His most trenchant weapon was the Order 
of Jesuits, who were invited to come in and establish 
schools. Moreover, the excellence of their colleges in 
foreign lands induced many of the nobility to send 
their sons to be educated under them, and thus were 
prepared the seeds of the Counter-Beformation. 

The death of Sigismund without an heir left Poland 
for a time masterless. During the interregnum the 
Diet passed the Compact of Warsaw by which abso- -^ 
lute religious liberty was granted to all sects — "Dis- 
sidentes de Keligione'^ — ^without exception. But, lib- ^J^ 
eral though the law was, it was vitiated ia practice by 
the right retaiaed by every master of punishing his 
serfs for religious as well as for secular causes. Thus 
it was that the lower classes were marched from Prot- 
estant pillar to Catholic post and back without again 
daring to rebel or to express any dioice in the matter. 

The election of Henrv of Valois, a vounsrer son of ?/°^, 
Catharine de' Medici, was made conditional on the 1573 
acceptance of a number of articles, including the main- 
tenance of religious liberty. The prince acceded, 
with some reservations, and was crowned on February 
21, 1574. Four months later he heard of the death 
of his brother, Charles IX, making him king of France. 
Without daring to ask leave of absence, he absconded 
from Poland on June 18, thereby abandoning a throne 
which was promptly declared vacant. 

The new election presented great difficulties, and 



144 



HUNGARY 



Stephen 
Bathory, 
157^-86 



Sigismund 
III, 1586- 
1632 

Bohemia 



Hungary, 
1526 



Zapolya, 
1526-40 



almost led to civil war. While the Senate declared for 
the Hapsburg Maximilian II, the Diet chose Stephen 
Bathory, prince of Transylvania. Only the unex- 
pected death of Maximilian prevented an armed col- 
lision between the two. Bathory, now in possession, 
forced his recognition by all parties and led the land 
of his adoption into a period of highly successful di- 
plomacy and of victorious war against Muscovy. His 
religious policy was one of pacification, conciliation, 
and of supporting inconspicuously the Jesuit founda- 
tions at Wilna, Posen, Cracow, and Kiga. But the full 
fruits of their propaganda, resulting in the complete 
reconversion of Poland to Catholicism were not reaped 
until the reign of his successor, Sigismund III, a Vasa, 
of Sweden. 

Bohemia, a Slav kingdom long united historically 
and dynastically with the Empire, as the home of Huss, 
welcomed the Reformation warmly, the Brethren turn- 
ing first to Luther and then to Calvin. After various 
efforts to suppress and banish them had failed of large 
success, the Compact of 1567 granted toleration to the 
three principal churches. As in Poland, the Jesuits 
won back the whole land in the next generation, so that 
in 1910 there were in Bohemia 6,500,000 Catholics and 
only 175,000 Protestants. 

Hungary was so badly broken by the Turks at the 
battle of Mohacs that she was able to play but little 
part in the development of Western civilization. Like 
her more powerful rival, she was also distracted by 
internal dissention. After the death of her King 
Lewis at Mohacs there were two candidates for the 
throne, Ferdinand the Emperor's brother and John 
Zapolya, "woiwod" or prince of Transylvania. Prot- 
estantism had a considerable hold on the nobles, who, 
after the shattering of the national power, . divided 
a portion of the goods of the church between them. 



HUNGAEY 145 

The Unitarian movement was also strong for a time, 
and the division this caused proved almost fatal to the 
Reformation, for the greater part of the kingdom was 
won back to Catholicism under the Jesuits' leadership. 1576-1612 
In 1910 there were about 8,600,000 Catholics in Hun- 
gary and about 3,200,000 Protestants. 

Transylvania, though a dependency of the Turks, Transyl- 
was allowed to keep the Christian religion. The Saxon ^^°'^ 
colonists in this state welcomed the Reformation, 
formally recognizing the Augsburg Confession in a 
synod of 1572. Here also the Unitarians attained 
their greatest strength, being recruited partly from 
those expelled from Poland. They drew their inspira- 
tion not merely from Sozini, but from a variety of 
sources, for the doctrine appeared simultaneously 
among certain Anabaptist and Spiritualist sects. 
Toleration was granted them on the same terms as 
other Christians. The name * ' Unitarian ' ' first appears 
in a decree of the Transylvania Diet of the year 1600. 
An appreciable body of this persuasion still remains 
in the country, together with a number of Lutherans, 
Calvinists, and Romanists, but the large majority of 
the people belong to two Greek Catholic churches. 



Confedera- 
tion 



CHAPTER III 
SWITZERLAND 

§ 1. ZwiNGLJ 

The Swiss Amid the snow-clad Alps and azure lakes of Switzer- 
land there grew up a race of Germans which, though 
still nominally a part of the Empire, had, at the period 
now considered, long gone on its own distinct path of 
development. Politically, the Confederacy arose in a 
popular revolt against the House of Austria. The 
federal union of the three forest cantons of Uri, 
Schwyz, and Unterwalden, first entered into in 1291 
and made permanent in 1315, was strengthened by the 
admission of Lucerne (1332), Zug (1352), Glarus 
(1351) and of the Imperial Cities of Zurich (1351) and 
Berne (1353). By the admission of Freiburg and 
Solothum (1481), Basle (1501), Schaffhausen (1501) 
and Appenzell (1513) the Confederacy reached the 
number of thirteen cantons at which it remained for 
many years. By this time it was recognized as a prac- 
tically independent state, courted by the great powers 
of Europe. Allied to this German Confederacy were 
two Romance-speaking states of a similar nature, the 
Confederacies of the Valais and of the Grisons. 

The Swiss were then the one free people of Europe. 
Republican government by popular magistrates pre- 
vailed in all the cantons. Liberty was not quite demo- 
cratic, for the cantons ruled several subject provinces, 
and in the cities a somewhat aristocratic electorate 
held power; nevertheless there was no state in Europe 
approaching the Swiss in self-government. Though 
they were generally accounted the best soldiers of the 

146 



ZWINGLI 147 

day, their military valor did not redound to their own 
advantage, for the hardy peasantry yielded to the soli- 
citations of the great powers around them to ent^r 
into foreign, mercenary service. The influential men, 
especially the priests, took pensions from the pope 
or from France or from other princes, in return for 
their labors in recruiting. The system was a bad one 
for both sides. Swiss politics w^ere corrupted and the 
land drained of its strongest men ; whereas the princes 
who hired the mercenaries often found to their cost 
that such soldiers were not only the most formidable to 
their enemies but also the most troublesome to them- 
selves, ahvays on the point of mutiny for more pay and 
plunder. The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of 
the system, and prohibited the taking of pensions in 
1503, though this law remained largely a dead letter. j^^J^"'^^'" 
The reputation of the mountaineers suffered a blow^ in 1515 ' 
their defeat by the French at Marignano, followed by a 
treaty with France, intended by that power to make 
Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a 
large annual subsidj^ payable to each of the thirteen 
cantons and to the Grisons and Valais as well. The 
country suffered from faction. The rural or ''Forest" 
cantons were jealous of the cities, and the latter, espe- 
cially Berne, the strongest, pursued selfish policies of 
individual aggrandizement at the expense of their con- 
federates. 

As everywhere else, the cities were the centers of 
culture and of social movements. Basle was famous 
for its university and for the great printing house of 
Froben. Here Albert Durer had stayed for a while 
durmg his wandering years. Here Sebastian Brant 
had studied and had written his famous satire. Here 
the great Erasmus had come to publish his New Testa- 
ment. 

But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in 1521-9 



Jetzer 
scandal 



148 SWITZERLAND 

part a child of humanism. Nationalism played its role 
in the revolt from Rome, memories of councils lingered 
at Constance and Basle, and the desire for a purer re- 
ligion made itself felt among the more earnest. Swit- 
zerland had at least one great shrine, that of Einsie- 
deln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in 
hopes of the plenary indulgence, expressly promising 
forgiveness of both guilt and penalty of sin. Berne 
was the theater of one of the most reverberating scan- 
dals enacted by the contemporary church. A passion- 

The ately contested theological issue of the day was whether 

the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This 
was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the 
Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary 
at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair 
was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent 
purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay 
brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. 
Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an im- 
poster, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, 
bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give 
details of her conception sufficiently gross to show 
that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the im- 

1509 maculate, manner. When the fraud was at last dis- 

covered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans 
involved were burnt at the stake. 

But the vague forces of discontent might never have 
crystallized into a definite movement save for the 
leadership of Ulrich Zw^ingli. He was born, January 
^"*^ 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg, amidst the lofty moun- 

tains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and beauty 
from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he 
noticed how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of 
danger, and how the squirrel crossed the stream on 
a chip. When he returned to the home of his father, 
a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard 



ZWINGLI 149 

stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that 
planted in his soul a deep love of his native land. The 
religion he learned was good Catholic; and the ele- 
ment of popular superstition in it was far less weird 
and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remem- 
bered one little tale told him by his grandmother, how 
the Lord God and Peter slept together in the same 
bed, and were Avakened each morning by the house- 
keeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside 
man. 

Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, 
the parish priest. At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle 
to study. Here he progressed well, becoming the head 
scholar, and here he developed a love of music and con- 
siderable skill in it. Later he went to school at Berne, 
where he attracted the attention of some friars who 
tried to guide him into their cloister, an effort appar- 
ently frustrated by his father. In the autumn of 
1498 he matriculated at Vienna. For some unknown 
cause he was suspended soon afterwards, but was 
readmitted in the spring of 1500. Two years later 
he went to Basle, where he completed his studies by 1506 
taking the master's degree. While here he taught 
school for a while. Theology apparently interested 
him little ; his passion was for the humanities, and his 
idol was Erasmus. Only in 1513 did he begin to learn 
Greek. 

If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canon- 
ical age, Zwdngli took orders, and became parish priest 
at Glarus, it was less because of any deep religious 
interest than because he found in the clerical calling 
the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters. 
He was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty 
gulden per annum. His first published work was a 
fable. The lion, the leopard, and the fox (the Em- isio 
peror, France, and Venice) try to drive the ox (Swit- 



150 SWITZERLAND 

zerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the 
herdsman (the pope). The same tendencies — papal, 

1512 patriotic, and political — are shown in his second book, 
an account of the relations between the Swiss and 

1516 French, and in The Labyrinth, an allegorical poem. 

The various nations appear again as animals, but the 
hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne 
thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the mon- 
sters of sin, shame, and vice. Zwingli's natural inter- 
est in politics was nourished by his experiences as field 

1513 chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of Novara 
^^^^ and Marignano. 

Was he already a Reformer? Not in the later sense 
of the word, but he was a disciple of Erasmus. Capito 
Avrote to Bullinger in 1536 : ''While Luther was in the 
hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light, 
Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope. 
For then our judgment was maturing under the influ- 
ence of Erasmus's society and by reading good au- 
thors." Though Capito over-estimated the opposition 
of the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other 
respects. Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of hu- 
manists, perfectly evident in his notes on St. Paul, 
stimulated him to visit the older scholar at Basle in 
the spring of 1516. Their correspondence began at 
the same time. Is it not notable that in The Labyrinth 
the thread of Ariadne is not religion, but reason? 
His religious ideal, as shown by his notes on St. Paul, 
was at this time the Erasmian one of an ethical, un- 
dogmatic faith. He interpreted the Apostle by the 
Sermon on the Mount and by Plato. He was still a 
good Catholic, without a thought of breaking away 
from the church. 
October, From Glarus Zwingli was called to Einsiedeln, where 

December ^^ remained for two years. Here he saw the super- 
1518 stitious absurdities mocked by Erasmus. Here, too, 



ZWINGLI 



151 



1, 1518 



January 1, 
1519 



he first came into contact with indulgences, sold 
throughout Switzerland by Bernard Samson, a Milan- 
ese Franciscan. Zwingli did not attack them with the 
impassioned zeal of Luther, but ridiculed them as ''a 
comedy." His position did not alienate him from the September 
papal authorities, for he applied for, and received, 
the appointment of papal acolyte. How little serious 
was his life at this time may be seen from the fact 
that he openly confessed that he was living in un- 
chastity and even joked about it. 

Notwithstanding his peccadillos, as he evidently re- 
garded them, high hopes were conceived of his abili- 
ties and independence of character. When a priest 
was wanted at Zurich, Zwingli applied for the posi- 
tion and, after strenuous canvassing, succeeded in get- 
ting it. 

Soon after this came the turning-point in Zwingli 's 
life, making of the rather worldly young man an 
earnest apostle. Two causes contributed to this. 
The first was the plague. Zwingli was taken sick in 
September and remained in a critical condition for 
many months. As is so often the case, sutfering and 
the fear of death made the claims of the other world 
so terribly real to him that, for the first time, he cried 
unto God from the depths, and consecrated his life to 
service of his Saviour. 

The second influence that decided and deepened i^i^ 
Zwingli 's life was that of Luther. He first mentions 
him in 1519, and from that time forth, often. All his 
works and all his acts thereafter show the impress of 
the Wittenberg professor. Though Zwingli himself 
sturdily asserted that he preached the gospel before 
he heard of Luther, and that he learned his whole doc- 
trine direct from the Bible, he deceived himself, as 
many men do, in over-estimating his own originality. 
He was truly able to say that he had formulated some 



152 SWITZERLAND 

of his ideas, in dependence on Erasmus, before he 
heard of the Saxon ; and he still retained his capacity 
for private judgment afterwards. He never followed 
any man slavishly, and in some respects he was more 
radical than Luther; nevertheless it is true that he 
was deeply indebted to the great German. 

Significantly enough, the first real conflict broke out 
at Zurich early in 1520. Zwingli preached against 
-^ fasting and monasticism, and put forward the thesis 
that the gospel alone should be the rule of faith and 
practice. He succeeded in carrying through a prac- 
tical reform of the cathedral chapter, but was obliged 
to compromise on fasting. Soon afterwards Zurich 
renounced obedience to the bishop. The Forest Can- 
tons, already jealous of the prosperity of the cities, 
endeavored to intervene, but were warned by Zwingli 
not to appeal to war, as it was an unchristian thing. 
Opposition only drove his reforming zeal to further 
efforts. 

In the spring of 1522 Zwingli formed with Anna 
Reinhard Meyer a union which he kept secret for two 
years, when he married her in church. In the mar- 
riage itself, though it was by no means unhappy, there 
was something lacking of fine feeling and of perfect 
love. 
Reforma- As the reform progressed, the need of clarification 

nonm ^y^g £gj^_ rjij^^g ^.^g brought about by the favorite 

method of that day, a disputation. The Catholics tried 
in vain to prevent it, and it was actually held in Jan- 
uary, 1523, on 67 theses drawn up by Zwingli. Here, 
as so often, it was found that the battle was half won 
when the innovators were heard. They themselves 
attributed this to the excellence of their cause; but, 
without disparaging that, it must be said that, as the 
psychology of advertising has shown, any thesis pre- 
sented with sufficient force to catch the public ear, is 



ZWINGLI 153 

sure to win a certain number of adherents. The Town October 27, 

1523 

Council of Zurich ordered the abolition of images and 
of the mass. The opposition of the cathedral chapter 
considerably delayed the realization of this pro- 
gram. In December the Council was obliged to con- 
cede further discussion. It was not until Wednes- 
day, April 12, 1525, that mass was said for the last 
time in Zurich. Its place was immediately taken, the 
next day, Maundy Thursday, by a simple communion 
service. At the same time the last of the convents were 
suppressed, or put in a condition assuring their event- / 
ual extinction. Other reforms included the abolition /^''^ 
of processions, of confirmation and of extreme unction. 
"With homely caution, a large number of simple souls 
had this administered to them just before the time 
allotted for its last celebration. Organs were taken 
out of the churches, and regular lectures on the Bible 
given. 

Alarmed by these innovations the five original can- 
tons, — Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, Lucerne and Zug, — ^.^^ 
formed a league in 1524 to suppress the '^ Hussite, 
Lutheran, and Zwinglian heresies." For a time it 
looked like war. Zwingli and his advisers drew up a 
remarkably thorough plan of campaign, including a 
method of securing allies, many military details, and 
an ample provision for prayer for victory. War, 
however, was averted by the mediation of Berne as a 
friend of Zurich, and the complete religious autonomy 
of each canton was guaranteed. 

The Swiss Eeformation had to run the same course 
of separation from the humanists and radicals, and of 
schism, as did the German movement. Though Eras- 
mus was a little closer to the Swiss than he had been 
to the Saxon Reformers, he was alienated by the out- 
rageous taunts of some of them and by the equally un- 
warranted attempts of others to show that he agreed 



154 SWITZERLAND 

with them. "They falsely call themselves evangeli- 
cal," he opined, "for they seek only two things: a 
salary and a wife." 

Then came the break with Luther, of which the 
/ story has already been told. The division was caused 
neither by jealousy, nor by the one doctrine — that of 
the real presence — on which it was nominally fought. 
There was in reality a wide difference between the 
two types of thought. The Saxon was both a mystic 
and a schoolman; to him religion was all in all and 
dogma a large part of religion. Zwingii approached 
the problem of salvation from a less personal, cer- 
tainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, 
liberal, empiric standpoint. He felt for liberty and 
for the value of common action in the state. He in- 
terpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his rea- 
^ son under the tuition of the Bible in its apparent mean- 
ing. 

Anabap- Ncxt camc the turn of the Anabaptists — those 

Bolsheviki of the sixteenth century. Their first leaders 
appeared at Zurich and were for a while bosom friends 
of Zwingii. But a parting of the ways was inevitable, 
for the humanist could have little sympathy with an 
uncultured and ignorant group — such they were, in 
spite of the fact that a few leaders were university 
graduates — and the statesman could not admit in his 
categories a purpose that was sectarian as against 
the state church, and democratic as against the exist- 
ing aristocracy. 

1523 His first work against them shows how he was torn 

between his desire to make the Bible his only guide 
and the necessity of compromising with the prevailing 
polity. As he was unable to condemn his opponents 
on any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer 
against them two charges that were false, though 
probably believed true by himself. As they were 



/ 



ZWINGLI 155 

ascetics in some particulars he branded them as mon- 
astic; for their social program he called them sedi- 
tious. 

The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the 
effect in Switzerland, as elsewhere, of causing the poor 
and oppressed to lose heart, and of alienating them 
from the cause of the official Protestant churches. A 
disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was hold at ^"^^^^^'^ 
Zurich; they were declared refuted, and the council 
passed an order for all unbaptized children to be 
christened within a week. The leaders were arrested 
and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that they advo- 
cated communism, which he considered wrong as the 
Bible's injunction not to steal implied the right of -"' 
private property. The Anabaptists denied that they 
were communists, but the leaders were bound over to 
keep the peace, some were fined and others banished. 
As persecuting measures almost always increase in 
severity, it was not long before the death penalty was 
denounced against the sectaries, and actually applied. 
In a polemic against the new sect entitled In Cata- J"iy'i527 
haptistarU'm Strophas Elenclms, Zwingli 's only argu- — 
ment is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the Ana- 
baptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force. His 
strife with them was harder than his battle with Rome. 
It seems that the reformer fears no one so much as 
him who carries the reformer's own principles to 
lengths that the originator disapproves. Zwingli saw 
in the fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political 
and social matters as he had done in ecclesiastical af- 
fairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at least, subversion of 
the polity he preferred, and, like all the other men of 
his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished 
it as crime. 

By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the Theocracy 
same tyrannical type as that later made famous by 



156 SWITZERLAND 

Geneva. Zwingli took the position of an Old Testa- 
ment prophet, subordinating state to church. At first 
he had agreed with the Anabaptists in separating 
(theoretically) church and state. But he soon came to 
believe that, though true Christians might need no 
government, it was necessary to control the wicked, 
and for this purpose he favored an aristocratic polity. 
All matters of morals were strictly regulated, severe 
laws being passed against taverns and gambling. The 
inhabitants were forced to attend church. After the 
suppression of the Catholics and the radicals, there 
developed two parties just as later in Geneva, the 
^^ Evangelical and the Indifferent, the policy of the latter 
being one of more freedom, or laxity, in discipline, 
and in general a preference of political to religious 
ends. 
Basle The Reformation had now established itself in other 

1522 '^' ^i^i^s of German Switzerland. Oecolampadius coming 
to Basle as the bearer of Evangelical ideas, won such 
1524 success that soon the bishop was deprived of author- 

1527 ■^^^'^' ^^'^ disputations with the Catholics were held, and 

the monasteries abolished. Oecolampadius, after tak- 
'ing counsel with Zwingli on the best means of sup- 
pressing Catholic worship, branded the mass as an act 
worse than theft, harlotry, adultery, treason, and mur- 
der, called a meeting of the town council, and requested 
them to decree the abolition of Catholic worship. 
October Though they replied that every man should be free to 
27, 1527 exercise what religion he liked, on Good Friday, 1528, 
the Protestants removed the images from Oecolampa- 
dius 's church, and grumbled because their enemies 
were yet tolerated. Liberty of conscience w^as only 
assured by the fairly equal division of the membership 
of the town council. On December 23, 1528, two hun- 
dred citizens assembled and presented a petition, 
drawn up by Oecolampadius, for the suppression of 



ZWINGLI 157 

the mass. On January 6, 1529, under pressure from 
the ambassadors of Berne and Zurich, the town coun- 
cil of Basle decreed that all pastors should preach 
only the Word of God, and asked them to assemble for 
instruction on this point. The compromise suited no 
one and on February 8 the long prepared revolution 
broke out. Under pretence that the Catholics had 
disobeyed the last decree, -a Protestant mob sur- / 
rounded the town hall, planted cannon, and forced the 
council to expel the twelve Catholic members, mean- 
while destroying church pictures and statues. *'It 
W'as indeed a spectacle so sad to the Superstitious," 
Oecolampadius wrote to Capito, "that they had to 
weep blood. . . . We raged against the idols, and the 
mass died of sorrow." 

A somew^iat similar development took place in 
Berne, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and Glarus. The favor- 
ite instrument for arousing popular interest and sup- 
port was the disputation. Such an one was held at ^^^ 
Baden in May and June, 1526. Zwingli declined to 
take part in this and the Catholics claimed the victory. 
This, however, did them rather harm than good, for 
the public felt that the cards had been stacked. A sim- 
ilar debate at Berne in 1528 turned that city completely 
to the Reformation. A synod of the Swiss Evangelical' 
churches w^as formed in 1527. This made for uni- 
formity. The publication of the Bible in a translation 
by Leo Jud and others, with prefaces by Zwingli, 
proved a help to the Evangelical cause. This trans- 1530 
lation was the only one to comjoete at all successfully 
with Luther's. 

The growing strength of the Protestant cantons en- 
couraged them to cany the reform by force in all 
places in which a majority was in favor of it. Zwin- 
gli 's far-reaching plans included an alliance with 
Hesse and w4th Francis I to whom he dedicated his 



158 



SWITZERLAND 



First Peace 
of Cappel 



two most important theological works, True and False 
Religion and An Exposition of the Christian Faith. 
April, 1529 The Catholic cantons replied by making a league with 
Austria. War seemed imminent and Zwingli was so 
heartily in favor of it that he threatened resignation 
if Zurich did not declare war. This was accordingly 
done on June 8. Thirty thousand Protestant soldiers 
marched against the Catholic cantons, which, without 
the expected aid from Austria, were able to put only 
nine thousand men into the field. Seeing themselves 
hopelessly outnumbered, the Catholics prudently nego- 
tiated a peace without risking a battle. The terms of 
this first Peace of Cappel forced the Catholics to re- 
nounce the alliance with Austria, and to allow the ma- 
jority of citizens in each canton to decide the religion 
they v/ould follow. Toleration for Protestants was 
provided for in Catholic cantons, though toleration of 
the old religion was denied in the Evangelical cantons. 
This peace marked the height of Zwingli 's power. 
He continued to negotiate on equal terms with Luther, 
and he sent missionaries into Geneva to win it to his 
cause and to the Confederacy. The Catholic cantons, 
stung to the quick, again sought aid from Austria and 
raised another and better army. Zwingli heard of this 
and advocated a swift blow to prevent it — the ''of- 
fensive defence. " Berne refused to join Zurich in this 
aggression, but agreed to bring pressure to bear on the 
Catholics by proclaiming a blockade of their frontiers. 
An army was prepared by the Forest Cantons, but 
Berne, whose entirely selfish policy was more disas- 
trous to the Evangelical cause than was the hostility 
of the league, still refused to engage in war. Zurich 
was therefore obliged to meet it alone. An army of 
only two thousand Zurichers marched out, accom- 
panied by Zwingli as field chaplain. Eight thousand 
Catholic troops attacked, utterly defeated them, and 



Defeat of 
Zwingli 



May, 1531 



ZWINGLT 159 

killed many on the field of battle. Zwingli, who, October il, 
though a non-combatant, was armed, was wounded and 
left on the field. Later he was recognized by enemies, 
killed, and his body burned as that of a heretic. 

The defeat was a disaster to Protestant Switzer- --- 
land not so much on account of the terms of peace, 
which were moderate, as because of the loss of pres- 
tige and above all of the great leader. His spirit, 
however, continued to inspire his followers, and lived 
in the Reformed Church. Indeed it has been said, 
though with exaggeration, that Calvin only gave his 
name to the church founded by Zwingli, just as Amer- 
icus gave his name to the continent discovered by Co- 
lumbus. In many respects Zwingli was the most lib- 
eral of the Reformers. In his last work he expressed 
the belief that in heaven would be saved not only 
Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but 
also ''Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, An- 
tigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios. . . . 
In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall 
there exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very 
foundation of the world to its consummation, whom 
you will not see there with God." Nevertheless, 
Zwingli was a persecutor and was bound by many of 
the dogmatic prepossessions of his time. But his re- . 
ligion had in it less of miracle and more of reason \ 
than that of any other founder of a church in the six- 
teenth century. He was a statesman, and more will- 
ing to trust the people than were his contemporaries, 
but yet he was ready to sacrifice his country to his 
creed. 

For a short time after the death of so many of its 
leading citizens in the battle of Cappel, Zurich was 
reduced to impotence and despair. Nor was she much 
comforted or assisted by her neighbors. Oecolampa- 
dius died but a few weeks after his friend; while Lu- 



1536 



160 SWITZERLAND 

ther and Erasmus sang paeans of triumph over the 
prostration of their rivals. Even Calvin considered it 
a judgment of God. Gradually by her own strength 
Zurich won her way back to peace and a certain in- 

Builinger, fluencc. Zwingli's follower, Henry Bullinger, the son 
of a priest, was a remarkable man. He not only built 
up his own city but his active correspondence with 
Protestants of all countries did a great deal to spread 
the cause of the Evangelical religion. In conjunction 
with Myconius, he drew up the first Swiss confession, 
accepted by Zurich, Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, St. 

^^^'^ Gall, Miilhausen and Biel; and later he made the 

agreement with Calvin known as the Consensus Ti- 
gurinus. In this the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doc- 
trines of the eucharist were harmonized as far as pos- 
sible. But while the former decreased the latter in- 
creased, and Geneva took the place of Zurich as the 
metropolis of the Reformed faith. 

I 2. Catwin 

On January 15, 1527, Thomas von Hofen wrote 
Zwingli from Geneva that he would do all he could 
to exalt the gospel in that city but that he knew it 
would be vain, for there were seven hundred priests 
working against him. This letter gives an insight 
into the methods by which new territory was evangel- 
ized, the quarters whence came the new influences, and 
the forces with which they had to contend. 

Among the early missionaries of ''the gospel" in 
French-speaking lands, one of the most energetic was 
Farcl, William Farel. He had studied at Paris under Le- 

1489-1565 fovre d 'Staples, and was converted to Lutheranism as 
early as 1521. He went first to Basle, where he learned 
to know Erasmus. Far from showing respect to the 
older and more famous man, he scornfully told him to 
his face that Froben's wife knew more theology than 



CALVIN 161 

did he. Erasmus's resentment showed itself in the 
nickname Phallicus that he fastened on his antag- 
onist. From Basle Farel went to Montbeliard and 
Aigle, preaching fearlessly but so fiercely that his 
friend Oecolampadius warned him to remember rather 
to teach than to curse. After attending the disputa- 1^28 
tion at Berne he evangelized western Switzerland. His "" 
methods may be learned from his work at Valangin 
on August 15, 1530. He attended a mass, but in the 
midst of it went up to the priest, tore the host for- 
cibly from his hands, and said to the people: ''This 
is not the God whom you worship: he is above in 
heaven, even in the majesty of the Father." In 1532 
he went to Geneva. Notwithstanding the fact that 
here, as often elsewhere, he narrowly escaped lynch- 
ing, he made a great impression. His red hair and 
hot temper evidently had their uses. 

The Reformer of French Switzerland was not des- Calvin, 

1509—64 

tined to be Farel, however, but John Calvin. Born 
at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died early and his fa- 
ther, who did not care for children, sent him to the 
house of an aristocratic friend to be reared. In this 
environment he acquired the distinguished manners 
and the hauteur for which he was noted. AVhen 
John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him 
appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might 
have got him a scholarship. At the age of twelve 
Gerard's influence procured for his son another of 
these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this 
was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the 
boy to go to Paris. Here for some years, at the Col- 
lege of Montaigu, Calvin studied scholastic philosophy 
and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval logic- 
chopper and schoolman by temperament. At the uni- 
versity Calvin won from his fellows the sobriquet of 
"the accusative case," on account of his censorious 



162 SWITZERLAND 

and fault-iinding disposition. At his father's wish 
John changed from theology to law. For a time he 
studied at the universities of Orleans and Bourges. 
At Orleans he came under the influence of two Prot- 
estants, Olivetan -and the German Melchior Volmar. 
On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote 
himself to the humanities. His first work, a com- 
mentary on Seneca's De Clementia, witnesses his wide 
reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical in- 
terests. 

It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus 
and Lefevre that he was led to the study of the Bible 
and of Luther's writings. Probably in the fall of 
1533 he experienced a ''conversion" such as stands 
at the head of many a religious career. A sudden 
beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from 
God, putting him to the proof and showing him in 
how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been 
living. He thereupon abandoned his former life with 
tears. 

In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure 
benefices he had held, and towards the end of the year 
left France because of the growing persecution, for 
he had already rendered himself suspect. After va- 
rious wanderings he reached Basle, where he pub- 
ojthe " lished the first edition of his Institutes of the Chris- 
Christian fid^^ Religion. It was dedicated, like two of Zwingli 's 
isse" ' works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new 
faith. It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt pub- 
licly in France in 1542. Originally written in Latin 
it was translated by the author into French in 1541, 
and reissued from time to time in continually larger 
editions, the final one, of 1559, being five times as 
bulky as the first impression. The thought, too, 
though not fundamentally changed, was rearranged 
and developed. Only in the redaction of 1541 was 



Institutes 



CALVIN 163 

predestination made perfectly clear. TLe first edi- 
tion, like Luther's catechism, took up in order the 
Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sac- 
raments. To this was added a section on Christian 
liberty, the power of the church, and civil government. 
In the last edition the arrangement followed en- 
tirely the order of articles in the Apostles' Creed, all * 
the other matter being digested in its relation to faith. 

In the Institutes Calvin succeeded in summing up A system 
the whole of Protestant Christian doctrine and prac- ° t eoogy 
tice. It is a work of enormous labor and thought. 
Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity have 
secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches 
that the Summa of Aquinas has in the Roman theology. 
It is like the Summa in other ways, primarily in that 
it is an attempt to derive an absolute, unchangeable 
standard of dogma from premises considered infal- 
lible. Those who have found great freshness in Cal- 
vin, a new life and a new realism, can do so only in 
comparison with the older schoolmen. Calvin simply 
went over their ground, introducing into their phi- 
losophy all the connotations that three centuries of 
progress had made necessary. This is not denying 
that his work was well written and that it filled a 
need urgently felt at the time. Calvin cultivated 
style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he 
saw its immense utility for propaganda. He studied 
especially brevity, and thought that he carried it to 
an extreme, though the French edition of the Institutes 
fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages. 
However, all things are relative, and compared to 
many other theologians Calvin is really concise and 
readable. 

There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's , 
works. I do not mean ''original" in any narrow • 
sense, for to the searcher for sources it seems that 



164 SWITZERLAND 

there is literally nothing new under the sun. But 
there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority 
cannot be found in his predecessors. Eecognizing the 
Bible as his only standard, he interpreted it accord- 
ing to the new Protestant doctors. First and fore- 
most he was dependent on Luther, and to an extent 
that cannot be exaggerated. Especially from the 
Catechisms, The Bondage of the Will, and The Baby- 
lonian Captivity of the Church, Calvin drew all his 
principal doctrines even to details. He also borrowed 
something from Bucer, Erasmus and Schwenckfeld, 
as well as from three writers who were in a certain 
sense his models. Melanchthon's Commonplaces of 
Theology, Zwingli's True and False Religion, and 
Farel's Brief Instruction in Christian Faith had all 
done tentatively what he now did finally. 
Theocentric The Center of Calvin's philosophy was God as the 
Almighty Will. His will was the source of all things, 
of all deeds, of all standards of right and wrong and 
of all happiness. The sole purpose of the universe, 
and the sole intent of its Creator, was the glorification 
of the Deity. Man's chief end was ''to glorify God 
and enjoy him forever." God accomplished this self- 
exaltation in all things, but chiefly through men, his 
noblest work, and he did it in various ways, by the 
salvation of some and the damnation of others. And 
his act was purely arbitrary; he foreknew and pre- 
destined the fate of every man from the beginning; 
he damned and saved irrespective of foreseen merit. 
' ' God 's eternal decree ' ' Calvin himself called ' ' fright- 
ful. ' ' ^ The outward sign of election to grace he 
thought was moral behavior, and in this respect he 
demanded the uttermost from himself and from his 
followers. The elect, he thought, were certain of sal- 
vation. The highest virtue was faith, a matter more 

1 "Decretum Dei aeternum honibile." 



character 



CALVIN 165 

of the heart than of the reason. The divinity of 
Christ, he said, was apprehended by Christian expe- '> 
rience, not by speculation. Eeason was fallacious ; left 
to itself the human spirit '^ could do nothing but lose 
itself in infinite error, embroil itself in difficulties and 
grope in opaque darkness." But God has given us 
his Word, infallible and inerrant, something that ''has 
flowed from his very mouth." *'We can only seek 
God in his Word," he said, ''nor think of him other- 
wise than according to his Word." 

Inevitably, Calvin sought to use the Bible as a rigid 
moral law to be fulfilled to the letter. His ethics were 
an elaborate casuistry, a method of finding the proper 
rule to govern the particular act. He preached a new 
legalism; he took Scripture as the Pharisees took the Legalism 
Law, and Luther's sayings as they took the Prophets, 
and he turned them all into stiff, fixed laws. Thus he 
crushed the glorious autonomy of his predecessor's 
ethical principles. It was Kant, who denied all Lu- 
ther's specific beliefs, but who developed his idea of 
the individual conscience, that was the true heir of 
his spirit, not Calvin who crushed the spirit in elab- 
orating every jot and tittle of the letter. In precisely 
the same manner Calvin killed Luther's doctrine of the 
priesthood of all believers. To Calvin the church was 
a sacramental, aristocratic organization, with an au- 
thoritative ministry. The German rebelled against 
the idea of the church as such ; the Frenchman simply 
asked what was the true church. So he brought back 
some of the sacramental miracle of baptism and the 
eucharist. In the latter he remained as medieval as 
Luther, never getting beyond the question of the mode 
of the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the 
bread and wine. His endeavor to rationalize the doc- 
trine of Augsburg, especially with reference to the 
^winglians, ha4 disastrous results. Only iwQ po§i- 



166 SWITZERLAND 

tions were possible, that the body and blood were pres- 
ent, or that they were not. By endeavoring to find 
some middle ground Calvin upheld a contradiction in 
terms : the elements were signs and yet were realities ; 
the body was really there when the bread was eaten 
by a believer, but really not there when the same bread 
was eaten by an infidel. The presence was actual, and 
yet participation could only occur by faith. While 
rejecting some of Luther's explanations, Calvin was 
undoubtedly nearer his position than that of Zwingli, 
which he characterized as ''profane." 

As few instructed and thinking persons now accept 
the conclusions of the Institutes, it is natural to under- 
estimate the power that they exercised in their own 
day. The book was the most effective weapon of Prot- 
estantism. This was partly because of the style, but 
His logic still more because of the faultless logic. The success 
of an argument usually depends far less on the truth 
of the premises than on the validity of the reasoning. 
And the premises selected by Calvin not only seemed 
natural to a large body of educated European opinion 
of his time, but were such that their truth or falsity 
was very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Cal- 
vin 's system has been overthrown not by direct attack, 
but b}'' the flank, in science as in war the most effective 
way. To take but one example out of many that 
might be given: what has modern criticism made of 
Calvin's doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture? But 
this science was as yet all but unknown: biblical exe- 
gesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute 
. extent literary and historical; it was almost exclu- 
sively philological and dogmatic. 

Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of 
salvation and damnation irrespective of merit has 
often excited a moral rather than an intellectual revul- 
sion. To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan Ed- 



CALVIN 167 

wards, it seems *'a delightful doctrine, exceeding Eternal 
bright, pleasant and sweet." But many men agree d^°^*^o° 
with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious 
tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly 
irrational and mean. Even at that time those who 
said that a man's will had no more to do with his des- 
tiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where 
to strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, 
aroused an intense opposition. Erasmus argued that : 
damnation given for inevitable crimes would make 
God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for call- 
ing God the cause of evil and for saying ''God doth 
damn so huge a number of people to intolerable tor- 
ments only for his own pleasure and for his o^\^l deeds 
wrought in them only by himself. ' ' An English here- 
tic, Cole of Faversham, said that the doctrine of pre- 
destination was meeter for devils than for Christians. 
''The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome Bolsec, "is a 
hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and 
patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself.'* 
But there was another side to the doctrine of elec- 
tion. There was a certain moral grandeur in the com- 
plete abandon to God and in the earnestness that was 
ready to sacrifice all to his will. And if we judge the 
tree by its fruits, at its best it brought forth a strong 
and good race. The noblest examples are not the the- 
ologians, Calvin and Knox, not only drunk with God 
but drugged with him, much less politicians like Henry 
of Navarre and William of Orange, but the rank and 
file of the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of Eng- 
land, "the choice and sifted seed wherewith God sowed 
the wilderness" of America. These men bore them- 
selves with I know not what of lofty seriousness, and 
with a matchless disdain of all mortal peril and all 
earthly grandeur. Believing themselves chosen ves- 
sels and elect instruments of grace, they could neither 



168 SWITZERLAND 

be seduced by carnal pleasure nor awed by human 
might. Taught that they were kings by the election of 
God and priests by the imposition of his hands, they 
despised the puny and vicious monarchs of this earth. 
They remained, in fact, what they always felt them- 
selves to be, an elite, "the chosen few." 

Having finished his great work, Calvin set out on his 
wanderings again. For a time he was at the court 
of the sympathetic Eenee de France, Duchess of Fer- 
rara. AVhen persecution broke out here, he again fled 
Geneva northward, and came, by chance, to Geneva. Here 
Farel was waging an unequal fight with the old church. 
Needing Calvin's help he went to him and begged his 
assistance, calling on God to curse him should he not 
stay. *' Struck with terror," as Calvin himself con- 
fessed, he consented to do so. 

Beautifully situated on the blue waters of Lake 
Leman in full view of Mont Blanc, Geneva was at this 
time a town of 16,000 inhabitants, a center of trade, 
pleasure, and piety. The citizens had certain liberties, 
but were under the rule of a bishop. As this person- 
age was usually elected from the house of the Duke of 
Savoy, Geneva had become little better than a depend- 
ency of that state. The first years of the sixteenth 
century had been turbulent. The bishop, John, had at 
one time been forced to abdicate his authority, but 
later had tried to resume it. The Archbishop of 
Vienne, Geneva's metropolitan, had then excommuni- 
cated the city and invited Duke Charles III of Savoy 
to punish it. The citizens rose under Bonivard, re- 
nounced the authority of the pope, expelled the bishop 
and broke up the religious houses. To guard against 
the vengeance of the duke, a league was made with 
Berne and Freiburg. 

On October 2, 1532, William Farel arrived from 
Berne. At Geneva as elsewhere tumult followed his 



f': 



CALVIN 169 

preaching, but it met with such success that by Janu- 
ary, 1534, he held a disputation which decided the city 
to become evangelical. The council examined the 
shrines and found machinery for the production of 1535 
bogus miracles; provisionally abolished the mass; and May 21, 
soon after formally renounced the papal religion. ^^^^ 

At this point Calvin arrived, and began preaching 
and organizing at once. He soon aroused opposition 
from the citizens, galled at his strictness and perhaps 
jealous of a foreigner. The elections to the council Calvin 
went against him, and the opposition came to a head February, 
shortly afterwards. The town council decided to 1538 
adopt the method of celebrating the eucharist used at 
Berne. For some petty reason Calvin and Farel re- 
fused to obey, and when a riot broke out at the Lord 's 
table, the council expelled them from the city. 

Calvin w^ent to Strassburg, where he learned to know 
Bucer and republished his Institutes. Here he mar- 
ried Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist, August, 
who was never in strong health and died, probably of 
consumption, on March 29, 1549. Calvin's married 
life lacked tenderness and joy. The story that he 
selected his wife because he thought that by reason of 
her want of beauty she would not distract his thoughts 
from God, is not well founded, but it does illustrate 
his attitude towards her. The one or more children 
bom of the union died in infancy. 

Calvin attended the Colloquy at Eatisbon, in the re- 1541 
suit of which he was deeply disappointed. In the 
meantime he had not lost all interest in Geneva. 
When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote, in the most polished 
Latin, an appeal to the city to return to the Roman 
communion, Calvin answered it. The party opposed j753g''^'' 
to him discredited itself by giving up the city's rights 
to Berne, and w^as therefore overthrown. The per- 
plexities presenting themselves to the council were be- 



170' 



SWITZERLAND 



Calvin re- 
turns, 1541 

Theocracy 



yond their powers to solve, and they felt obliged to 
recall Calvin, who returned to remain for the rest of 
his life. 

His position was so strong that he was able to make 
of Geneva a city after his own heart. The form of 
government he caused to prevail was a strict theocracy. 
The clergy of the city met in a body known as the 
Congregation, a ''venerable company" that discussed 
and prepared legislation for the consideration of the 
Consistory. In this larger body, besides the clergy, 
the laity were represented by twelve elders chosen by 
the council, not by the people at large. The state and 
church were thus completely identified in a highly aris- 
tocratic polity. 

''The office of the Consistory is to keep watch on the 
life of everyone." Thus briefly was expressed the 
delegation of as complete powers over the private lives 
of citizens as ever have been granted to a committee. 
The object of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances was to 
create a society of saints. The Bible was adopted as 
the norm ; all its provisions being enforced except such 
Jewish ceremonies as were considered abrogated by 
the New Testament. The city was divided into quar- 
ters, and some of the elders visited every house at least 
once a year and passed in review the whole life, ac- 
tions, speech, and opinions of the inmates. The houses 
of the citizens were made of glass; and the vigilant 
eye of the Consistory, served by a multitude of spies, 
was on them all the time. In a way this espionage but 
took the place of the Catholic confessional. A joke, a 
gesture was enough to bring a man under suspicion. 
The Elders sat as a regular court, hearing complaints 
and examining witnesses. It is true that they could 
inflict only spiritual punishments, such as public cen- 
sure, penance, excommunication, or forcing the culprit 
to demand pardon in church on his knees. But when 



CALVIN 171 

the Consistory thought necessary, it could invoke the 
aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom 
doubtful. Among the capital crimes were adultery, 
blasphemy, witchcraft, and heresy. Punishments for 
all offences were astonishingly and increasingly heavy. 
During the years 1542-6 there were, in this little town 
of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight executions and * 
seventy-six banishments. 

In judging the Genevan theocracy it is important to 
remember that everywhere, in the sixteenth century, 
punishments were heavier than they are now, and the 
regulation of private life minuter.^ Nevertheless, 
though parallels to almost everything done at Geneva 
can be found elsewhere, it is true that Calvin intensi- 
fied the medieval spirit in this respect and pushed it to 
the farthest limit that human nature would bear. 

First of all, he compelled the citizens to fulfil their 
religious duties. He began the process by which later 
the Puritans identified the Jewish Sabbath and the 
Lord's Day. Luther had thought the injunction to 
rest on the Seventh Day a bit of Jewish ceremonial 
abrogated by the new dispensation and that, after at- 
tending church, the Christian might devote the day to 
what work or pleasure he thought proper. Calvin, 
however, forbade all work and commanded attendance 
on sermons, of which an abundance were offered to the 
devout. In addition to Sunday services there were, 
as in the Catholic church, morning prayers every work 
day and a second service three days a week. All cere- 
monies with a vestige of popery about them were for- 
bidden. The keeping of Christmas was prohibited ^^^^ 
under pain of fine and imprisonment. 

''As I see that we cannot forbid men all diversions," 
sighed Calvin, "I confine myself to those that are 
really bad." This class was sufficiently large. The 

1 See below, Chapter X, section 3. 



of conduct 



172 SWITZERLAND 

theater was denounced from the pulpit, especially 
when the new Italian habit of giving women's parts to 
actresses instead of to boys was introduced. Accord- 
ing to Calvin's colleague Cop, "the women who mount 
the platform to play comedies are full of unbridled 
effrontery, without honor, having no purpose but to 
expose their bodies, clothes, and ornaments to excite 
the impure desires of the spectators. . . . The whole 
tiling," he added, '4s very contrary to the modesty 
of women who ought to be shamefaced and shy. ' ' Ac- 
cordingly, attendance on plays was forbidden. 
Supervision Among otlicr prohibited amusements was dancing, 
especially obnoxious as at that time dances were ac- 
companied by kisses and embraces. Playing cards, 
cursing and swearing were also dealt with, as indeed 
they were elsewhere. Among the odd matters that 
came before the Consistory were: attempted suicide, 
possessing the Golden Legend (a collection of saints' 
lives called by Beza "abominable trash"), paying for 
masses, betrothing a daughter to a Catholic, fasting 
on Good Friday, singing obscene songs, and drunken- 
ness. A woman was - chastized for taking too much 
wine even though it did not intoxicate. Some hus- 
bands w^ere mildly reprimanded, not for beating their 
wives which was tolerated by contemporary opinion, 
but for rubbing salt and vinegar into the wales. Lux- 
ury in clothing was suppressed; all matters of color 
and quality regulated by law, and even the way in 
which women did their hair. In 1546 the inns were 
put under the direct control of the government and 
strictly limited to the functions of entertaining — or 
rather of boarding and lodging — strangers and cit- 
izens in temporary need of them. Among the numer- 
ous rules enforced within them the following may be 
selected as typical : 

If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, "By 



CALVIN 173 

the body, 'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives Rules for 
himself to the devil or uses similar execrable impreca- ^^^^ 
tions, he shall be punished. . . . 

If any one insults any one else the host shall be obliged 
to deliver him up to justice. 

If there are any persons who make it their business to 
frequent the said inns, and there to consume their goods 
and substance, the host shall not receive them. 

Item the host shall be obliged to report to the govern- 
ment any insolent or dissolute acts committed by the 
guests. 

Item the host shall not allow any person of whatever 
quality he be, to drink or eat anything in his house with- 
out first having asked a blessing and afterwards said 
grace. 

Item the host shall be obliged to keep in a public place 
a French Bible, in which any one who wishes may read, 
and he shall not prevent free and honest conversation on 
the Word of God, to edification, but shall favor it as much 
as he can. 

Item the host shall not allow any dissoluteness like 
dancing, dice or cards, nor shall he receive any one sus- 
pected of being a debauehe or ruffian. 

Item he shall only allow people to play honest games 
without swearing or blasphemj^ and without wasting 
more time than that allowed for a meal. 

Item he shall not allow indecent songs or words, and if 
any one wishes to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall 
make them do it in a decent and not in a dissolute way. 

Item nobody shall be allowed to sit up after nine 
o'clock at night except spies. 

Of course, such matters as marriage were regulated 
strictly. When a man of seventy married a girl of 
twenty-five Calvin said it was the pastor's duty to 
reprehend them. The Refonner often selected the 
women he thought suitable for his acquaintances who 
wanted wives. He also drew up a list of baptismal 
names which he thought objectionable, including the 
names of *4dols," — i. e. saints venerated near Geneva 
— the names of kings and offices to whom God alone ap- 



174 SWITZERLAND 

points, such as Angel or Baptist, names belonging to 
God such as Jesus and Emanuel, silly names such as 
Toussaint and Noel, double names and ill-sounding 
names. Calvin also pronounced on the best sort of 
stoves and got servants for his friends. In fact, there 
was never such a busy-body in a position of high au- 
thority before nor since. No wonder that the citizens 
frequently chafed under the yoke. 

If we ask how much was actually accomplished by 
this minute regulation accompanied by extreme se- 
verity in the enforcement of morals, various answers 
are given. When the Italian reformer Bernardino 
Occhino visited Geneva in 1542, he testified that curs- 
ing and swearing, unchastity and sacrilege were un- 
known; that there were neither lawsuits nor simony 
nor murder nor party spirit, but that universal benev- 
olence prevailed. Again in 1556 John Knox said that 
Geneva was "the most perfect school of Christ that 
ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In 
other places," he continued, *'I confess Christ to be 
truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely 
reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides." 
But if we turn from these personal impressions to an 
examination of the acts of the Consistory, we get a 
very different impression. The records of Geneva 
Morals sliow morc cascs of vice after the Reformation than be- 
fore. The continually increasing severity of the pen- 
alties enacted against vice and frivolity seem to prove 
that the government was helpless to suppress them. 
Among those convicted of adultery were two of Cal- 
vin's own female relatives, his brother's wife and his 
step-daughter Judith. What success there was in 
making Geneva a city of saints was due to the fact that 
it gradually became a very select population. The 
worst of the incorrigibles were soon either executed or 
banished, and their places taken by a large influx of 



of Geneva 



CALVIN 175 

men of austere mind, dra^vn thither as a refuge from 
persecution elsewhere, or by the desire to sit at the feet 
of the great Reformer. Between the years 1549 and 
1555 no less than 1297 strangers were admitted to cit- 
izenship. Practicalh^ all of these were immigrants 
coming to the little town for conscience's sake. 

Orthodoxy was enforced as rigidly as morality. Persecution 
The ecclesiastical constitution adopted in 1542 brought 
in the Puritan type of divine service. Preaching took 
the most important place in church, supplemented by 
Bible reading and catechetical instruction. Laws were 
passed enforcing conformity under pain of losing 
goods and life. Those who did not expressly renounce 
the mass were punished. A little girl of thirteen was 
condemned to be publicly beaten with rods for saying 
that she wanted to be a Catholic. Calvin identified his 
o^vn wishes and dignity with the commands and honor 
of God. One day he forbade a citizen, Philibert 
Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table. Berthelier 
protested and was supported by the council. *'If God 
lets Satan crush my ministry under such tyranny," 
shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with me. ' ' The slight- 
est assertion of liberty on the part of another was 
stamped out as a crime. Sebastian Castellio, a sin- 
cere Christian and Protestant, but more liberal than 
Calvin, fell under suspicion because he called the 
Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new 
French version of the Bible to replace the one of 
Olivetan officially approved. He was banished in 
1544. Two years later Peter Ameaux made some very 
trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he 
was forced to fall on his knees in public and ask 
pardon. 

But opposition only increased. The party opposing 
Calvin he called the Libertines — a word then meaning 
something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting 



176 SWITZEELAl^D 

the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word 
January, ' 'miscreant" had formerly done. One of these men, 
^^'^^ James Gruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's 

church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil 
terms, to leave the city. He was at once arrested and 
a house to house search made for his accomplices. 
This method failing to reveal anything except that 
Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words 
''all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice 
a day, morning and evening, for a whole month. The 
frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate any- 
one else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He 
was charged with "disparaging authors like Moses, 
who by the Spirit of God wrote the divine law, saying 
that Moses had no more power than any other man. 
. . . He also said that all laws, human and divine, 
were made at the pleasure of man." He was there- 
fore sentenced to death for blasphemy and beheaded 
on July 26, 1547, ''calling on God as his Lord." After 
his death one of his books was found and condemned. 
To justify this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said 
that Jesus Christ was a good-for-nothing, a liar, and a 
false seducer, and that he (Gruet) denied the existence 
of God and immortality. Evangelical freedom had 
now arrived at the point where its champions first took 
a man's life and then his character, merely for writ- 
- ing a lampoon! 

Naturally such tyranny produced a reaction. The 

enraged Libertines nicknamed Calvin Cain, and saved 

from his hands the next personal enemy, Ami Perrin, 

whom he caused to be tried for treason. A still more 

October 16, bitter dose for the theocrat was that administered by 

1^51 . 

Jerome Bolsec, who had the audacity to preach against 
the doctrine of predestination. Calvin and Farel re- 
futed him on the spot and had him arrested. Berne, 
5asle ^nd Zurich intervened ^nd, when solicited for 



1553 



CALVIN 177 

an expression on the doctrine in dispute, spoke inde- 
cisively. The triumph of his enemies at this rebuke 
Avas hard for Calvin to bear and prepared for the com- 
mission of the most regrettable act of his career. 

The Spanish physician Michael Servetus published, Sen-etus 
in Germany, a work on the Errors concerning the 
Trinity. His theory was not that of a modern ration- 
alist, but of one whose starting point was the authority 
of the Bible, and his unitarianism was consequently of 
a decidedly theological brand, recalling similar doc- 
trines in the early church. Leaving Germany he went 
to Viemio, in France, and got a good practice under 
an assumed name. He later published a work called, 
perhaps in imitation of Calvin's Tnstitutio, The Resti- 
tution of Christianity, setting forth his ideas about the 
Trinity, whcli he compared to the three-headed mon- 
ster Cerberus, but admitting the divinity of Christ. 
He also denied the doctrine of original sin and as- 
serted that baptism should be for adults only. He 
was poorly advised in sending this book to the Re- 
former, with whom he had some correspondence. 
With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his instiga- 
tion, though he later issued an equivocating denial, 
William Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the 
Catholic inquisition at Vienne and forwarded the ma- 
terial sent by the heretic to Calvin. On June 17, 1553, 
the Catholic inquisitor, expressly stating that he acted 
on this material, condemned Servetus to be burnt by 
slow fire, but he escaped and went to Geneva. 

Here he was recognized and arrested. Calvin at 
once appeared as his prosecutor for heresy. The 
charges against him were chiefly concerned with his 
denial of the Trinity and of infant baptism, and \vitli 
his attack on the person and teaching of Calvin. As 
an example of the point to which Bibliolatry could sup- 
press candor it may be mentioned that one of the 



178 SWITZERLAND 

charges against him was that he had asserted Palestine 
to be a poor land. This was held to contradict the 
Scriptural statement that it was a land flowing with 
milk and honey. The minutes of the trial are painful 
reading. It was conducted on both sides with unbe- 
coming violence. Among other expressions used by 
Calvin, the public prosecutor, were these: that he re- 
garded Servetus's defence as no better than the bray- 
ing of an ass, and that the prisoner was like a villain- 
ous cur wiping his muzzle. Servetus answered in the 
same tone, his spirit unbroken by abuse and by his 
confinement in a horrible dungeon, where he suffered 
from hunger, cold, vermin, and disease. He was found 
guilty of heresy and sentenced to be burnt with slow 
fire. Calvin said that he tried to alter the manner of 
execution, but there is not a shred of evidence, in the 
mmutes of the trial or elsewhere, that he did so. Pos- 
sibly, if he made the request, it was purely formal, as 
were similar petitions for mercy made by the Roman 
inquisitors. At any rate, while Calvin 's alleged effort 
for mercy proved fruitless, he visited his victim in 
prison to read him a self-righteous and insulting lec- 
ture. Farel, also, reviled him on the way to the stake. 
Death of at which he perished on October 26, 1553, crying, ''God 

Scrvctus 

preserve my soul! Jesus, Son of the eternal God, 
have mercy on me!" Farel called on the bystanders 
to witness that these words showed the dying man to 
be still in the power of Satan. 

This act of persecution, one of the most painful in 
the history of Christianity, was received with an out- 
burst of applause from almost all quarters. Melanch- 
thon, who had not been on speaking terms with Calvin 
for some years, was reconciled to him by what he 
called "a signal act of piety." Other leading Protes- 
tants congratulated Calvin, who continued persecution 
systematically. Another victim of his was Matthew 



CALVIN 179 

Gribaldi, whom he delivered into the hands of the gov- 
ernment of Berne, with a refutation of his errors. 1564 
Had he not died of the plague in prison he would prob- 
ably have suffered the same fate as Sei-vetus. 

Strengthened by his victory over heresy, Calvin now Complete 

tiicocracv 

had the chance to annihilate his opponents. On May 1555 
15, 1555, he accused a number of them of treason, 
and provided proof by ample use of the rack. With 
the party of Libertines completely broken, Calvin ruled 
from this time forth with a rod of iron. The new 
Geneva was so cowed and subservient that the town 
council dared not install a new sort of heating ap- 
paratus without asking the permission of the theocrat. 
But a deep rancor smouldered under the surface. 
''Our incomparable theologian Calvin," wrote Am- 
brose Blaurer to BuUinger, "labors under such hatred 
of some whom he obscures by his light that he is con- 
sidered the worst of heretics by them. ' ' Among other 
things he was accused of levying tribute from his fol- 
lowers by a species of blackmail, threatening publicly 
to denounce them unless they gave money to the cause. 

At the same time his international power and repu- intema- 
tation rose. Geneva became the capital of Protes- *'.^"fj^^^^" 
tantism, from which mandates issued to all the coun- 
tries of Western Europe. Englishmen and French- 
men, Dutchmen and Italians, thronged to "this most 
perfect school of Christ since the apostles" to learn 
the laws of a new type of Christianity. For Calvin's 
Reformation was more thorough and logical than was 
Luther's. The German had regarded all as permitted 
that was not forbidden, and allowed the old usages to 
stand in so far as they were not repugnant to the ordi- 
nances of the Bible. But Calvin believed that all was 
forbidden save what was expressly allowed, and hence 
abolished as superstitious accretions all the elements 
of the medieval cult that could find no warrant in the 



vinism 



180 SWITZERLAND 

Bible. Images, vestments, organs, bells, candles, rit- 
ual, were swept away in the ungarnished meeting-house 
to make way for a simple service of Bible-reading, 
prayer, hymn and sermon. The government of the 
church was left by Calvin in close connection with the 
state, but he apparently turned around the Lutheran 
conception, making the civil authority subordinate to 
the spiritual and not the church to the state. 

Whereas Lutheranism appealed to Germans and 
Scandinavians, Calvinism became the international 
form of Protestantism. Even in Germany Calvin 
made conquests at the expense of Luther, but outside 
of Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, 
he moulded the type of reformed thought in his own 
image. It is difficult to give statistics, for it is im- 
possible to say how far each particular church, like 
the Anglican for example, was indebted to Calvin, how 
far to Luther, and how far to other leaders, and also 
because there was a strong reaction against pure Cal- 
vinism even in the sixteenth century. But it is safe to 
say that the clear, cold logic of the Institutes, the good 
French and Latin of countless other treatises and let- 
ters, and the political thought which amalgamated 
easily with rising tides of democracy and industrial- 
ism, made Calvin the leader of Protestantism outside 
' of the Teutonic countries of the north. His gift for 
organization and the pains he took to train ministers 
and apostles contributed to this success. 
Death of Qj^ -^ 27, 1564 Calvin died, worn out with labor 

Calvin, May . 

27,1564 and ill health at the age of fifty-five. With a cold 
heart and a hot temper, he had a clear brain, an iron 
will, and a real moral earnestness derived from the 
conviction that he was a chosen vessel of Christ. Con- 
stantly tortured by a variety of painful diseases, he 
drove himself, by the demoniac strength of his will, to 
perform labor that would have taxed the strongest. 



OALVIN 181 

The way he ruled his poor, suffering body is symbolic 
of the way he treated the sick world. To him the 
maladies of his own body, or of the body politic, were 
evils to be overcome, at any cost of pain and sweat and 
blood, by a direct effort of the will. As he never 
yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt 
with the vice and frivolity he detested, crushing it out 
by a ruthless application of power, hunting it with 
spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it on the 
wheel. But a gentler, more understanding method 
would have accomplished more, even for his own 
purpose. 

His successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, was a man Beza, 
after his own heart but, as he was far weaker, the town 
council gradually freed itself from spiritual tyranny. 
Towards the end of the century the pastors had been 
humbled and the questions of the day were far less 
the dogmatic niceties they loved than ethical ones such 
as the right to take usury, the proper penalty for 
adultery, the right to make war, and the best form of 
government. 



1519-1605 



CHAPTER IV 
FRANCE 

§ 1. Renaissance and Refoemation 

Though, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the 
France French may have attained to no greater degree of na- 
tional self-consciousness than had the Germans, they 
had gone much farther in the construction of a national 
state. The significance of this evolution, one of the 
strongest tendencies of modern history, is that it 
squares the outward political condition of the people 
with their inward desires. When once a nation has 
come to feel itself such, it cannot be happy until its 
polity is united in a homogeneous state, though the 
reverse is also true, — that national feeling is some- 
times the result as well as the cause of political union. 
With the growth of a common language and of com- 
mon ideals, and with the improvement of the methods 
of communication, the desire of the people for unity 
became stronger and stronger, until it finally overcame 
the centrifugal forces of feudalism and of particular- 
ism. These were so strong in Germany that only a 
very imperfect federation could be formed by way of 
national government, but in France, though they were 
still far from moribund, external pressure and the 
growth of the royal power had forged the various prov- 
inces into a nation such as it exists today. The most 
independent of the old provinces, Brittany, was now 
Louis XII iiiiited to the crown by the marriage of its duchess 
1498-1515 Anne to Louis XII. 

Geographically, France was nearly the same four 
hundred years ago as it is today, save that the eastern 

182 



EENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 183 






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184 



FRANCE 



frontier was somewhat farther west. The line then 
ran west of the three Bishoprics, Verdun, Metz and 
Toul, west of Franche Comte, just east of Lyons and 
again west of Savoy and Nice. 

Politically, France was then one of a group of semi- 
popular, semi-autocratic monarchies. The rights of 
the people were asserted by the States General which 
met from time to time, usually at much longer in- 
tervals than the German Diets or the English Parlia- 
ments, and by the Parlements of the various provinces. 
These latter were rather high courts of justice than 
legislative assemblies, but their right to register new 
laws gave them a considerable amount of authority. 
The Parlement of Paris was the most conspicuous and 
perhaps the most powerful. 

The power of the monarch, resting primarily on the 
support of the bourgeois class, was greatly augmented 
by the Concordat of 1516, which made the monarch 
almost the supreme head of the Galilean church. For 
two centuries the crown had been struggling to attain 
this position. It was because so large a degree of 
autonomy was granted to the national church that the 
French felt satisfied not to go to the extreme of seces- 
sion from the Roman communion. It was because the 
king had already achieved a large control over his own 
clergy that he felt it unnecessary or inadvisable to go 
to the lengths of the Lutheran princes and of Henry 
VIII. In that one important respect the Concordat 
of Bologna took the place of the Reformation. 

Francis I was popular and at first not unattractive. 
Robust, fond of display, ambitious, intelligent enough 
to dabble in letters and art, he piqued himself on being 
chivalrous and brave. But he wasted his life and 
ruined his health in the pursuit of pleasure. His face, 
as it has come down to us in contemporary paintings, 
is disagreeable. He was, as with unusual candor a 



EENAISSANCE AND EEFOEMATION 185 

contemporary observer put it, a devil even to the ex- 
tent of considerably looking it. 

While to art and letters Francis gave a certain 
amount of attention, he usually from mere indolence 
allowed the affairs of state to be guided by others. 
Until the death of his mother, Louise of Savoy, he was 1531 
ruled by her. Thereafter the Constable Anne de 
]\Iontmorency was his chief minister. The policy fol- 
lowed was the inherited one which was, to a certain 
point, necessary in the given conditions. In domestic 
affairs, the king or his advisors endeavored to increase 
the povv^er of the crown at the expense of the nobles. 
The last of the great vassals strong enough to assert 
a quasi-independencQ of the king was Charles of Bour- 1523-4 
bon. He was arrested and tried by the Parlement of 
Paris, which consistently supported the crown. Flee- 
ing from France he entered the service of Charles V, 
and his restoration was made an article of the treaty ^^^^ 
of Madrid. His death in the sack of Rome closed the ^ ^^^^ 
incident in favor of the king. 

The foreign policy of France was a constant strug- 
gle, now b}^ diplomacy, now by arms, with Charles V. 
The principal remaining powers of Europe, England, 
Turkey and the pope, threw their weight now on one 
side now on the otlier of the two chief antagonists. 
Italy was the field of most of the battles. Francis be- 
gan his reign by invading that country and defeating ^^l^^ ^^ 
tlie Swiss at Marignano, thus conquering Milan. The 1515 
campaigns in Italy and Southern France culminated 
in the disastrous defeat of the French at Pavia. ''24 [525^ 
Francis fought in person and was taken prisoner. 
' ' Of all things nothing is left me but honor and life, ' ' 
he wrote his mother. 

Francis hoped that he would be freed on the pay- 
ment of ransom according to the best models of chiv- 
alry, He found, however, when he was removed to 



1526 



186 FEANCE 

Madrid in May, that his captor intended to exact the 
last farthing of diplomatic concession. Discontent in 
France and the ennui and illness of the king finally 
forced him to sign a most disadvantageous treaty, re- 
nouncing the lands of Burgundy, Naples and Milan, 
and ceding lands to Henry VIII. The king swore to 
the document, pledged his knightly honor, and as ad- 
ditional securities married Eleanor the sister of 
Charles and left two of his sons as hostages. 

Even when he signed it, however, he had no inten- 
tion of executing the provisions of the treaty which, he 
secretly protested, had been wrung from him by force. 
The deputies of Burgundy refused to recognize the 
right of France to alienate them. Henry VIII at once 
made an alliance against the ''tyranny and pride" of 
the emperor. Charles was so chagrined that he chal- 
lenged Francis to a duel. This opera bouffe perform- 
ance ended by each monarch giving the other ''the lie 
in the throat." 

Though France succeeded in making with new allies, 
the pope and Venice, the League of Cognac, and though 
Germany was at that time embarrassed by the Turkish 
invasion, the ensuing war turned out favorably to the 
emperor. The ascendancy of Charles was so marked 
that peace again had to be made in his favor in 1529. 
The treaty of Cambrai, as it was called, was the treaty 
of Madrid over again except that Burgundy was kept 
by France. She gave up, however, Lille, Douai and 
other territory in the north and renounced her suze- 
rainty over Milan and Naples. Francis agreed to pay 
a ransom of two million crowns for his sons. Though 
he was put to desperate straits to raise the money, 
levying a 40 per cent, income tax on the clergy and a 10 
per cent, income tax on the nobles, he finally paid the 
money and got back his children in 1530. 

By this time France was so exhausted, both in 



RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 187 

money and men, that a policy of peace was the only 
one possible for some years. Montmorency, the prin- 
cipal minister of the king, continued by an active 
diplomacy to stir np trouble for Charles. While sup- 
pressing Lutherans at home he encouraged the Schmal- 
kaldic princes abroad, going to the length of inviting 
Melanchthon to France in 1535. With the English 
minister Cromwell he came to an agreement, nothwith- 
standing the Protestant tendencies of his policy. An 
alliance was also made with the Sultan Suleiman, se- 
cretly in 1534, and openly x^roclaimed in 1536. In or- 
der to prepare for the military strife destined to be 
renewed at the earliest practical moment, an ordinance 
of 1534 reorganized and strengthened the army. 

Far more important for the life of France than her 
incessant and inconclusive squabbling with Spain was 
the transformation passing over her spirit. It is 
sometimes said that if the French kings brought noth- Reforma- 
ing else back from their campaigns in Italy they 
brought back the Renaissance. There is a modicum 
of truth in this, for there are some traces of Italian in- 
fluence before the reign of Francis I. But the French 
spirit hardly needed this outside stimulus. It was 
awakening of itself. Scholars like William Bude and 
the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets 
like Marot, were the natural product of French soil. 
Everywhere, north of the Alps no less than south, 
there was a spontaneous eflBorescence of intellectual 
activity. 

The Reformation is often contrasted or compared 
with the Renaissance. In certain respects, where a 
common factor can be found, this may profitably be 
done. But it is important to note how different in 
kind were the two movements. One might as well 
compare Darwinism and Socialism in our own time. 
The one was a new way of looking at things, a fresh 



tion 



188 FEANCE 

intellectual start, without definite program or organ- 
ization. The other was primarily a thesis: a set of 
tenets the object of which was concrete action. The 
Eeformation began in France as a school of thought, 
but it soon grew to a political party and a new church, 
and finally it evolved into a state within the state. 
Christian Though it is not safe to date the French Reforma- 

tion before the influence of Luther was felt, it is pos- 
sible to see an indigenous reform that naturally pre- 
pared the way for it. Its harbinger was Lefevre 
-— - d'lStaples. This ''little Luther" wished to purify the 
church, to set aside the ''good works" thereof in favor 
of faith, and to make the Bible known to the people. 
He began to translate it in 1521, publishing the Gos- 
pels in June 1523 and the Epistles and Acts and Apo- 
calypse in October and November. The work was not 
as good as that of Luther or Tyndale. It was based 
chiefly on the Vulgate, though not without reference to 
the Greek text. Lefevre prided himself on being lit- 
eral, remarking, mth a side glance at Erasmus 's Para- 
phrases, that it was dangerous to try to be more ele- 
gant than Scripture. He also prided himself on 
writing for the simple, and was immensely pleased 
with the favorable reception the people gave his work. 
To reach the hearts of the poor and humble he insti- 
tuted a reform of preaching, instructing his friends 
to purge their homilies of the more grossly supersti- 
tious elements and of the scholastic theology. Instead 
of this they were to preach Christ simply with the 
aim of touching the heart, not of dazzling the mind. 

Like-minded men gathering around Lefevre formed 
a new school of thought. It was a movement of re- 
vival within the church; its leaders, wishing to keep 
all the old forms and beliefs, endeavored to infuse into 
them a new spirit. To some extent they were in con- 
scious reaction against the intellectualism of l^r^smu? 



RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 189 

and the Renaissance. On the other hand they were far 
from wishing to follow Luther, when he appeared, in 
his schism. 

Among the most famous of these mystical reformers 
were William BriQonnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his "^ 
disciple, Margaret d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I. 
Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak 
and suggestible. She adored her dissolute brother 
and was always, on account of her marriages, first with i509 
Charles, duke of AleuQon, and then with Henry d'Al- ^^^^ 
bret, king of Navarre, put in the position of a sup- 
pliant for his support. She carried on an assiduous 
correspondence with Brigonnet as her spiritual direc- 
tor, being attracted first by him and then by Luther, 
chiefly, as it seems, through the wish to sample the 
novelty of their doctrines. She wrote The Mirror of 
the Sinful Soul in the best style of penitent piety. ^^^^ 
Its central idea is the love of God and of the '*debon- 
naire" Jesus. She knew Latin and Italian, studied 
Greek and Hebrew, and read the Bible regularly, ex- 
horting her friends to do the same. She coquetted 
with the Lutherans, some of whom she protected in 
France and with others of whom in Germany she cor- 
responded. She was strongly suspected of being a -^ 
Lutheran, though a secret one. Capito dedicated to 
her a commentary on Ilosea ; Calvin had strong hopes 
of mnning her to an open profession, but was disap- 
pointed. Her house, said he, which might have be- 
come the family of Jesus Christ, harbored instead 
servants of the devil. Throughout life she kept the 
accustomed Catholic rites, and wrote with much respect 
to Pope Paul III. But fundamentally her religious 
idealism was outside of any confession. 

This mystically pious woman wrote, in later life, the 
Heptameron, a book of stories published posthu- 
mously. Modelled on the Decameron, it consists al- 



190 FEANCE 

most entirely of licentious stories, told without repro- 
bation and with gusto. If the mouth speaketh from 
the fullness of the heart she was as much a sensualist 
in thought as her brother was in deed. The apparent 
contradictions in her are only to be explained on the 
theory that she was one of those* impressionable na- 
tures that, chameleon-like, 'always take on the hue of 
their environment. 

But though the work of Lefevre and of BriQonnet, 
who himself gave his clergy an example of simple, 
biblical preaching, won many followers not only in 
Meaux but in other cities, it would never have pro- 
duced a religious revolt like that in Germany. The 
Reformation was an importation into France; *'The 
key of heresy, ''-as -John Bouchet said in 1531, ''was 
made of the fine iron of Germany.'^ At first almost 
all the intellectuals hailed Luther as an ally. Lefevre 
sent him a greeting in 1519, and in the same year Bude 
spoke w^ell of him. His books were at this time ap- 
proved even by some doctors of the Sorbonne. But it 
took a decade of confusion and negation to clarify the 
situation sufiSciently for the French to realize the exact 
import of the Lutheran movement, which completely 
transformed the previously existing policy of Lefevre. 
The chief sufferer by the growth of Lutheranism was 
not at first the Catholic church but the party of Cath- 
olic reform. The schism rent the French evangelicals 
before it seriously affected the church. Some of them 
followed the new light and others were forced back 
into a reactionary attitude. 

The first emissaries of Luther in France were his 
books. Froben exported a volume containing nearly 
all he had published up to October, 1518, immediately 
and in large quantities to Paris. In 1520 a student 
there wrote that no books were more quickly bought. 
At first only the Latin ones were intelligible to the 



EEXAISSANCE AND EEFOEMATIOX 191 

French, but there is reason to believe that very early 
translations into the vernacular were made, though 
none of this period have survived. It was said that 
the books, which kept pouring in from Frankfort and 
Strassburg and Basle, excited the populace against the 
theologians, for the people judged them by the newly 
published French New Testament. A bishop com- 
plained that the common people were seduced by the 1523 
vivacity of the heretic's style. 

It did not take the Sorbonne long to define its posi- 
tion as one of hostility. The university, which had 
been lately defending the Gallican liberties and had 
issued an appeal from pope to future council, was one 
of the judges selected by the disputants of the Leipzig 
debate. Complete records of the speeches, taken by 
notaries, were accordingly forwarded to Paris by Duke 
George of Saxony, with a request for an opinion. . 
After brief debate the condemnation of Luther by the April is 
university was printed. ^^^^ 

Neither was the government long in taking a posi- 
tion. That it should be hostile was a foregone con- 
clusion. Francis hated Lutheranism because he be- /- 
lieved that it tended more to the overthrow of king- 
doms and monarchies than to the edification of souls. 
He told Aleander, the papal nuncio, that he thought March, 
Luther a rascal and his doctrine pernicious. ^^^^ 

The king was energetically seconded by the Parle-^-Apnl, 
ment of Paris. A royal edict provided that no book ^^^^ 
should be printed without the imprimatur of the uni- 
versity. The king next ordered the extirpation of the 
errors of Martin Luther of Saxony, and, having begun 
by burning books, continued, as Erasmus observed was 
usually the case, by burning people. The first to suf- 
fer was John Valliere. At the same time Briconnet 1523 
was summoned to Paris, sharply reprimanded for 
leniency to heretics and fined two hundred livres, in 



192 FRANCE 

consequence of which he issued two decrees against the 
heresy, charging it with attempting to subvert the 

1524 hierarchy and to abolish sacerdotal celibacy. When 
Lefevre's doctrines were condemned, he submitted; 
those of his disciples who failed to do so were pro- 
scribed. But the efforts of the government became 
more strenuous after 1524. Francis was at this time 
courting the assistance of the pope against the em- 
peror, and moreover he was horrified by the outbreak 
of the Peasants' War in Germany. Convinced of the 
danger of allowing the new sect to propagate itself 
any further he commanded the archbishops and bish- 
ops of his realm to ''proceed against those who hold, 
publish and follow the heresies, errors and doctrines 

1525 Qf Martin Luther." Lefevre and some of his friends 
fled to Strassburg. Arrests and executions against 
those who were sometimes called ''heretics of Meaux," 
and sometimes Lutherans, followed. 

The theologians did not leave the whole burden of 
the battle to the government. A swarm of anti- 
Lutheran tracts issued from the press. Not only the 
heresiarch, but Erasmus and Lefevre were attacked. 
Their translations of the Bible were condemned as 
blasphemies against Jerome and against the Holy 
Ghost and as subverting the foundations of the Chris- 
tian religion. Luther's sacramental dogmas and his 
repudiation of monastic vows were refuted. 

Nevertheless the reform movement continued. At 
this stage it was urban, the chief centers being Paris, 
Meaux, and Lyons. Many merchants and artisans 
were found among the adherents of the new faith. 
While none of a higher rank openly professed it, the- 
ology became, under the lead of Margaret, a fashion- 
able subject. Conventicles were formed to read the 
Bible in secret not only among the middle classes but 
also at court. Short tracts continued to be the best 



RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 193 

methods of propaganda, and of these many were 
translations. Louis de Berquin of Artois, a layman, Berquin 
proved the most formidable champion of the new opin- ^'^^^^^^^ 
ions. Though he did little but translate other men's 
work he did that with genius. His version of Eras- 
mus's Manual of a Christian Knight was exquisitely 
done, and his version of Luther's Tesseradecas did not 
fall short of it. Tried and condemned in 1523, he was 
saved by the king at the behest of Margaret. The 1526 
access of rigor during the king's captivity gave place 
to a momentary tolerance. Berquin, Avho had been 
arrested, was liberated, and Lefevre recalled from 
exile. But the respite was brief. Two years later, 
Berquin was again arrested, tried, condemned, and 
executed speedily to prevent reprieve on April 17, 
1529. But the triumph of the conservatives was more 
apparent than real. Lutheranism continued to gain 
silently but surely. 

"While the Reformation was growing in strength and 
numbers, it was also becoming more definite and co- 
herent. Prior to 1530 it was almost impossible to 
tell where Lutheranism began and where it ended. 
There was a large, but vague and chaotic public opin- 
ion of protest against the existing order. But after 
1530 it is possible to distinguish several parties, three 
of which at first reckoned, among the supporters of the 
Reformation, now more or less definitely separated 
themselves from it. The first of those was the party 
of Meaux, the leaders of which submitted to the gov- 
ernment and went their o^vn isolated way. Then there 
was a party of Erasmian reform, mainly intellectual 
but profoundly Christian. Its leader, William Bude, 
felt, as did Erasmus, that it was possible to unite the 
classical culture of the Renaissance with a purified 
Catholicism. Attached to the church, and equally re- 
pelled by some of the dogmas and by tlie apparent so- 



194 



FEANCE 



cial effects of the Reformation, Bude, who had spoken 
well of Luther in 1519, repudiated him in 1521. 

Finally there was the party of the ''Libertines" or 
free-thinkers, the representatives of the Renaissance 
pure and simple. Revolutionaries in their own way^i 
consciously rebels against the older culture of the Mid- 
dle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion 
and to toy with it, even to use it as an ally against com- 
mon enemies, the interest of these men was funda- 
mentally too different from that of the Reformers to 
enable them to stand long on the same platform. 
There was Clement Marot, a charming but rather aim- 
less poet, a protege of Margaret and the ornament of 
a frivolous court. Though his poetic translation of 
the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is 
often sensual as well as sensuous. Though for a time 
absenting himself from court he re-entered it in 1536 
at the same time "abjuring his errors." 

Of the same group was Francis Rabelais, whose 
Pantagruel appeared in 1532. Though he wrote Eras- 
mus saying that he owed all that he was to him, he in 
fact appropriated only the irony and mocking spirit 
of the humanist without his deep underlying piety. 
He became a universal skeptic, and a mocker of all 
things. The ''esprit gaulois," beyond all others alive 
to the absurdities and inconsistency of things, found in 
him its incarnation. He ridiculed both the "pope- 
maniacs" and the "pope-phobes," the indulgence- 
sellers and the inquisitors, the decretals "written by 
an angel" and the Great Schism, priests and kings and 
doubting philosophers and the Scripture. Paul III 
called him "the vagabond of the age." Calvin at first 
reckoned him among those who "had relished the gos- 
pel, ' ' but when he furiously retorted that he considered 
Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of 
Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his 



EENAISSANCE AND EEFORMATION 195 

Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called ''a 
Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the 
gospel, that holy and sacred pledg'e of life eternal." 
William Farel had in mind Rabelais 's recent accept- 
ance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. 
Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin on May 
25, 1551: ''I fear that avarice, that root of evil, has 
extinguished all faith and piety in the poets of 
Margaret. Judas, having sold Christ and taken the 
biretta, instead of Christ has that hard master Sa- 
tan. "^ 

The stimulus given b}^ the various attacks on the Catholic 
church, both Protestant and infidel, showed itself 
promptly in the abundant spirit of reform that sprang 
up in the Catholic fold. The clergy and bishop braced 
themselves to meet the enemy; they tried in some in- 
stances to suppress scandals and amend their lives; 
they brushed up their theology and paid more atten- 
tion to the Bible and to education. 

But the *' Lutheran contagion" continued to spread - 
and grow mightily. In 1525 it was found only at 
Paris, Meaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Bourges, Tours and 
AlenQon. Fifteen years later, though it was still con- 
fined largely to the cities and towns, there were cen- 
ters of it in every part of France except in Brittany. 
The persecution at Paris only drove the heretics into 
hiding or banished them to carry their opinions broad- 
cast over the land. The movement swept from the 
north and east. The propaganda was not the work ^ 
of one class but of all save that of the great nobles. 
It was not yet a social or class affair, but a purely in- 
tellectual and religious one. It is impossible to esti- 

1 Harvard Theological Review, 1919, p. 209. Margaret had died sev- 
eral years liefore, but Rabelais was called her poet because he had 
claimed her protection and to her wrote a poem in 1545. Oeuvres de 
Rabelais, ed. A. Lefranc, 1912, i, pp. xxiii, cxxxix. Cf. also Calvin's 
letter to the Queen of Navarre, April 28, 1545. Opera, xii, pp. G5f, 



196 FRANCE 

mate the numbers of the new sect. In 1534 Aleander 
said there were thirty thousand Lutherans in Paris 
alone. On the contrary Rene du Bellay said that there 
were fewer in 1533 than there were ten years previous. 
True it is that the Protestants were as yet weak, and 
were united rather in protest against the established 
order than as a definite and cohesive party. Thus, the 
most popular and successful slogans of the innovators 
were denunciation of the priests as anti-Christs and 
apostates, and reprobation of images and of the mass 
as idolatry. Other catchwords of the reformers were, 
*Hhe Bible" and "justification by faith." The move- 
ment was without a head and without organization. 
Until Calvin furnished these the principal inspiration 
came from Luther, but Zwingli and the other German 
and Swiss reformers were influential. More and 
more, Lef evre and his school sank into the background. 

For a time it seemed that the need of leadership was 
to be supplied by William Farel. His learning, his 
eloquence, and his zeal, together with the perfect safety 
of action that he found in Switzerland, were the neces- 
sary qualifications. The need for a Bible was at first 
met by the version of Lefevre, printed in 1532. But 
the Catholic spirit of this work, based on the Vulgate, 
was distasteful to the evangelicals. Farel asked 
Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new ver- 
sion, which was completed by February 1535. Cahdn 
wrote the preface for it. It was dedicated to ''the 
poor little church of God." In doctrine it was thor- 
oughly evangelical, replacing the old "eveques" and 
''pretres" by ''surveillants" and ''anciens," and omit- 
ting some of the Apocrypha. 

Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants 
became bolder in their attacks on the Catholics. The 
situation verged more and more towards violence; 



EENAISSANCE AND REFOEMATION 197 

neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance 
for both. On the night of October 17-18 some pla- 
cards, written by Anthony de Marcourt, were posted 
up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and Blois and on 
the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise. They 
excoriated the sacrifice of the mass as a horrible and 
intolerable abuse invented by infernal theologj^ and 
directly counter to the tnie Supper of our Lord. The 
government was alarmed and took strong steps. Pro- 
cessions were instituted to appease God for the sacri- 
lege. Within a month two hundred persons were ar- 
rested, twenty of whom were sent to the scaffold and 
the rest banished after confiscation of their goods. 

But the government could not afford to continue 
an uninterruptedly rigorous policy. The Protestants 
found their opportunity in the exigencies of the for- 
eign situation. In 1535 Francis was forced by the in- 
creasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not 
only with the infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League. 
He would have had no scruples in supporting abroad 
the heresy he suppressed at home, but he found the 
German princes would accept his friendship on no 
terms save those of tolerance to French Protestants. 
Accordingly on July 16, 1535, Francis was obliged to 
publish an edict ordering persecution to cease and 
liberating those who were in prison for conscience's 
sake. 

But the respite did not last long. New rigors were 
undertaken in April 1538. Marot retracted his errors, 
and Rabelais, while not fundamentally changing his 
doctrine, greatly softened, in the second edition of his 1542 
Pantagruel, the abusive ridicule he had poured on the 
Sorbonne. But by this time a new era was inaug- 
urated. The deaths of Erasmus and Lefevre in 1536 
gave the coup de grace to the party of the Christian 



198 FEANCE 

Eenaissance, and the publication of Calvin's Institutes 
in the same year finally gave the French Protestants a 
much needed leader and standard. 

§ 2. The Calvinist Party. 1536-1559 

Truce of The truce of Nice providing for a cessation of hostil- 

Nice,i538 -^j^^ between France and the Hapsburgs for ten years, 
was greeted with much joy in France. Bonfires cele- 
brated it in Paris, and in every way the people made 
known their longing for peace. Little the king cared 
for the wishes of his loyal subjects when his own dig- 
nity, real or imagined, was at stake. The war with 
Charles, that cursed Europe like an intermittent fever, 
broke out again in 1542. Again France was the ag- 
gressor and again she was worsted. The emperor in- 
vaded Champagne in person, arriving, in 1544, at a 
point within fifty miles of Paris. As there was no 
army able to oppose him it looked as if he would 
march as a conqueror to the capital of his enemy. But 
he sacrificed the advantage he had over France to a 
desire far nearer his heart, that of crushing his rebel- 
lious Protestant subjects. Already planning war with 
the League of Schmalkalden he wished only to secure 

Treaty of jjjg q^-^ safety from attack by his great rival. The 
treaty made at Crepy was moderate in its terms and 
left things largely as they were. 

Henry II, On March 31, 1547, Francis I died and was succeeded 

, by his son, Henry II, a man of large, strong frame, 
passionately fond of all forms of exercise, especially 
of hunting and jousting. He had neither his father's 
versatility nor his fickleness nor his artistic interests. 
His policy was influenced by the aim of reversing his 
father's wishes and of disgracing his father's favor- 
ites. 

1533 "While his elder brother was still alive, Henry had 

married 'Catharine de^ Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo 



THE CALVINIST PARTY 199 

[I de' Medici of Florence. The girl of fourteen in a 
foreign country was uncomfortable, especially as it 
was felt, after her husband became Dauphin, that her 
rank was not equal to his. The failure to have any 
3hildren during the first ten years of marriage made 
lier position not only unpleasant but precarious, but 
the birth of her first son made her unassailable. In 
rapid succession she bore ten children, seven of whom 
survived childhood. Though she had little influence 
on affairs of state during her husband's reign, she 
acquired self-confidence and at last began to talk and 
act as queen. 

At the age of seventeen Henry fell in love with a Diana of 
woman of thirty-six, Diana de Poitiers, to whom his 
devotion never wavered until his death, when she was 
sixty. Notwithstanding her absolute ascendancy over 
her lover she meddled little with affairs of state. 

The direction of French policy at this time fell Admiral 
largely into the hands of two powerful families. The 1519^72 
first was that of Coligny. Of three brothers the ablest 
was Gaspard, Admiral of France, a firm friend of 
Henry's -as well as a statesman and warrior. Still 
more powerful was the family of Guise, the children - 
of Claude, Duke of Guise, who died in 1527. The eld- Francis of 
est son, Francis, Duke of Guise, was a great soldier. 
His brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, won a high 
place in the councils of state, and his sister Mary, by 
her marriage with James V of Scotland, brought added 
prestige to the family. The great power wielded by 
this house owed much to the position of their estates, 
part of which were fiefs of the French king and part 
subject to the Empire. As suited their convenience 
they could act either as Frenchmen or as foreign 
nobles. 

Under Henry France enjoyed a period of expansion Expansion 
such as she had not had for many years. The per- 



200 FEANCE 

petual failures of Francis were at last turned into sub- 
stantial successes. This was due in large part to the 
civil war in Germany and to the weakness of England 's 
rulers, Edward VI and Mary. It was due in part to 
the irrepressible energy of the French bourgeois and 
gentlemen, in part to the genius of Francis of Guise. 
The co-operation of France and Turkey, rather an 
identity of interests than a formal alliance, a policy 
equally blamed by contemporaries and praised by his- 
torians, continued. But the successes achieved were 
due most of all to the definite abandonment of the hope 
of Italian conquests and to the turning of French arms 
to regions more suitable for incorporation under her 
government. 

War having been declared on Charles, the French 
seized the Three Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, 
Metz, Verdun, and Toul. A large German army under 
Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the bril- 
liant defence of Francis of Guise. AVorn by the at- 
trition of repulsed assaults and of disease the imperial 
army melted away. When the siege was finally raised 
Guise distinguished himself as much by the humanity 
with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as 
he had by his military prowess. 

Six years later Guise added fresh laurels to his 
fame and new possessions to France by the conquest 
of Calais and Guines, the last English possessions in 
French territory. The loss of Calais, which had been 
held by England since the Hundred Years War, was an 
especially bitter blow to the islanders. These vic- 
tories were partly counterbalanced by the defeats of 
French armies at St. Quentin on the Somme and by 
Egmont at Gravelines. When peace was signed at 
Oateau-Cambresis, France renounced all her conquests 
in the south, but kept the Three Bishoprics and Calais, 
all of which became her permanent possessions. 



THE CALVINIST PARTY 201 

Wliile France was thus expanding her borders, the Calvinism 
internal revohition matured rapidly. The last years 
of Francis and the reign of Henry II saw a prodigious 
growth of Protestantism. What had begun as a sect 
now became, by an evolution similar to that experi- 
enced in Germany, a powerful political party. It is 
the general fate of new causes to meet at first with 
opposition due to habit and the instinctive reaction of 
almost all minds against *'the pain of a new idea." 
But if the cause is one suited to the spirit and needs 
of the age, it gains more and more supporters, slowly 
if left to itself, rapidly if given good organization and 
adequate means of presenting its claims. The thor- 
ough canvassing of an idea is absolutely essential to 
win it a following. Now, prior to 1536, the Protes- 
tants had got a considerable amount of publicity as 
well through their own writings as through the attacks 
of their enemies. But not until Calvin settled at Ge- -^^ 
neva and began to write extensively in French, was the 
cause presented in a form capable of appealing to the 
average Frenchman. Calvin gave not only the best 
apology for his cause, but also furnished it with a 
definite organization, and a coherent program. He 
supplied the dogma, the liturgy, and the moral ideas 
of the new religion, and he also created ecclesiastical, 
political, and social institutions in harmony with it. A 
bom leader, he followed up his work with personal 
appeals. Ilis vast correspondence with French Prot- 
estants shows not only much zeal but infinite pains and 
considerable tact in driving home the lessons of his 
l^rinted treatises. 

Though the appeal of Calvin's dogmatic system was 
greater to an age interested in such things and trained 
to regard them as highly important, than we are likely 
to suppose at present, this was not Calvinism's only or 
even its main attraction to intelligent people. Like 



202 FRANCE 

every new and genuine reform Calvinism had the ad- 
vantage of arousing the enthusiasm of a small but ac- 
tive band of liberals. The religious zeal as well as the 
moral earnestness of the age was naturally drawn to 
the Protestant side. As the sect was persecuted, no 
one joined it save from conscientious motives. 
Against the laziness or the corruption of the prelates, 
too proud or too indifferent to give a reason for their 
faith, the innovators opposed a tireless energy in sea- 
son and out of season; against the scandals of the 
court and the immorality of the clergy they raised the 
banner of a new and stern morality; to the fires of 
martyrdom they replied with the fires of burning faith. 

The missionaries of the Calvinists were very largely 
drawn from converted members of the clergy, both 
secular and regular, and from those who had made a 
profession of teaching. For the purposes of propa- 
ganda these were precisely the classes most fitted by 
training and habit to arouse and instruct the people. 
Tracts were multiplied, and they enjoyed, notwith- 
standing the censures of the Sorbonne, a brisk cir- 
culation. The theater was also made a means of 
propaganda, and an effective one. 

Picardy continued to be the stronghold of the Prot- 
estants throughout this period, though they were also 
strong at Meaux and throughout the north-east, at 
Orleans, in Normandy, and in Dauphine. Great prog- 
ress was also made in the south, which later became 
the most Protestant of all the sections of France. 

The Catholics continued to rely on force. There 
was a counter-propaganda, emanating from the Uni- 
versity of Paris, but it was feeble. The Jesuits, in the 
reign of Henry II, had one college at Paris and two in 
Auvergne ; otherwise there was hardly any intellectual 
effort made to overcome the reformers. Indeed, the 
Catholics hardly had the munitions for such a combat. 

/ 



THE CALVINIST PARTY 203 

Apart from the great independents, holding them- 
selves aloof from all religions controversy, the more 
intelligent and enterprising portion of the educated 
class had gone over to the enemy. 

But the government did its best to supply the want 
of argument by the exercise of authority. New and 
severe edicts against *Hhe heresies and false doctrines 
of Luther and his adherents and accomplices" were 
issued. The Sorbonne prohibited the reading and sale 
of sixty-five books by name, including the works of 
Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Dolet, and Marot, and all 
translations of the Bible issued by the publishing house 
of Estienne. 

The south of France had in earlier centuries been 
prolific in sects claiming a Protestantism older than 
that of Augsburg. Like the Bohemian Brethren they 
eagerly welcomed the Calvinists as allies and were rap- 
idly enrolled in the new church. Startled by the stir- 
ring of the spirit of reform, the Parlement of Aix, ' 
acting in imitation of Simon de Monfort, ordered two 1540 
towns, Merindol and Cabrieres, destroyed for their 
heresy. The sentence was too drastic for the French 
government to sanction immediately ; it was therefore 
postponed by command of the king, but it was finally 1545 
executed, at least in part. A ghastly massacre took 
place in which eight hundred or more of the Waldenses 
perished. A cry of horror was raised in Germany, in 
Switzerland, and even in France, from which the king 
himself recoiled in terror. 

Only a few days after his accession Henry issued an 
edict against blasphemy, and this was followed by a 
number of laws against heresy. A new court of jus- 
tice was created to deal with heretics. From its habit ^^^f^^^^ 
of sending its victims to the stake it soon became 
known as the Chambre Ardente. Its powers were so 
extensive that the clergy protested against them as 



204 FEANCE 

infringements of their rights. In its first two years 
it pronounced five hundred sentences, — and what sen- 
tences ! Even in that cruel age its punishments were 
frightful. Burning alive was the commonest. If the 
heretic recanted on the scaffold he was strangled be- 
fore the fire was lit ; if he refused to recant his tongue 
was cut out. Those who were merely suspected were 
cast into dungeons from which many never came out 
alive. Torture was habitually used to extract con- 
fession. For those who recanted before sentence 
milder, but still severe, punishments were meted out: 
imprisonment and various sorts of penance. By the 
edict of Chateaubriand a code of forty-six articles 
against heresy was drawn up, and the magistrate em- 
powered to put suspected persons under surveillance. 

In the face of this fiery persecution the conduct of 
the Calvinists was wonderfully fine. They showed 
great adroitness in evading the law by all means save 
recantation and great astuteness in using what poor 
legal means of defence were at their disposal. On the 
other hand they suffered punishment with splendid 
constancy and courage, very few failing in the hour 
of trial, and most meeting death in a state of exalta- 
tion. Large numbers found refuge in other lands. 
During the reign of Henry II fourteen hundred fled 
to Geneva, not to mention the many who settled in the 
Netherlands, England, and Germany. 

Far from lying passive, the Calvinists took the offen- 
sive not only by writing and preaching but by attack- 
ing the images of the saints. Many of these were 
broken or defaced. One student in the university of 
Paris smashed the images of the Virgin and St. Se- 
bastian and a stained glass window representing the 
crucifixion, and posted up placards attacking the cult 
of the saints. For this he was pilloried three times 
and then shut into a small hole walled in on all sides 



THE CALVINIST PAETY 205 

save for an aperture through which food was passed 
him until he died. 

Undaunted by persecution the innovators continued 
to grow mightily in numbers and strength. The 
church at Paris, though necessarily meeting in secret, 
was well organized. The people of the city assembled 
together in several conventicles in private houses. 
By 1559 there w^ere forty fully organized churches 
{eglises dressees) throughout France, and no less than 
2150 conventicles or mission churches {eglises 
plantees). Estimates of numbers are precarious, but 
good reason has been advanced to show that early in 
the reign of Henry the Protestants amounted to one- 
sixth of the population. Like all enthusiastic minori- 
ties thej^ wielded a power out of proportion to their 
numbers. Increasing continually, as they did, it is 
probable, but for the hostility of the government, they 
would have been a match for the Catholics. At any 
rate they were eager to try their strength. A new 
and important fact was that they no longer consisted 
entirely of the middle classes. High officers of gov- 
ernment and great nobles began to join their ranks. 
In 1546 the Bishop of Nimes protected them openly, 
being himself suspected, probably with justice, of Cal- 
vinism. In 1548 a lieutenant-general was among those 
prosecuted for heresy. Anthony of Bourbon, a de- 
scendant of Louis IX, a son of the famous Charles, Con- 
stable of France, and husband of Joan d 'Albret, queen 
of Navarre, who was a daughter of Margaret d'An- 1555 
gouleme, became a Protestant. About the same time 
the great Admiral Coligny was converted, though it 
was some years before he openly professed his faith. 
His brother, d'Andelot, also adhered to the Calvinists 
but was later persuaded by the king and by his wife 
to go back to the Catholic fold. 

So strong had the Protestants become that the 



20e FRANCE 

French government was compelled against its will to 
tolerate them in fact if not in principle, and to recog- 
nize them as a party in the state with a quasi-consti- 
tutional position. The synod held at Paris in May, 
1559, was evidence that the first stage in the evolution 
of French Protestantism was complete. This assem- 
bly drew up a creed called the Confessio Gallicana, 
setting forth in forty articles the purest doctrine of 
Geneva. Besides affirming belief in the common ar- 
ticles of Christianity, this confession asserted the 
dogmas of predestination, justification by faith only, 
and the distinctive Calvinistic doctrine of the eucharist. 
The worship of saints was condemned and the neces- 
sity of a church defined. For this church an organiza- 
tion and discipline modelled on that of Geneva was 
provided. The country was divided into districts, the 
churches within which were to send to a central con- 
sistory representatives both clerical and lay, the latter 
to be at least equal in number to the former. Over 
the church of the whole nation there was to be a na- 
tional synod or '^Colloque'' to which each consistory 
was to send one clergyman and one or two lay elders. 
Alarmed by the growth of the Protestants, Henry 
II was just preparing, after the treaty of Cateau- 
Cambresis, to grapple with them more earnestly than 
ever, when he died of a wound accidentally received 
in a tournament. His death, hailed by Calvin as a 
merciful dispensation of Providence, conveniently 
marks the ending of one epoch and the beginning of 
another. For the previous forty years France had 
been absorbed in the struggle with the vast empire of 
the Hapsburgs. For the next forty years she was 
completely occupied with the wars of religion. Ex- 
ternally, she played a weak role because of civil strife 
and of a contemptible government. Indeed, all her 
interests, both foreign and domestic, were from this 



THE CALVINIST PARTY 207 

time forgotten in the intensity of the passions aroused 
by fanaticism. The date of Henry's demise also 
marks a change in the evolution of the French gov- 
ernment. Hitherto, for some centuries, the trend had 
been away from feudalism to absolute monarchy. The 
ideal, *'une foi, une loi, un roi" had been nearly at- 
tained. But this was now checked in two ways. The 
great nobles found in Calvinism an opportunity to 
assert their privileges against the king. The middle 
classes in the cities, especially in those regions where 
sectionalism was still strong, found the same oppor- 
tunity but turned it to the advantage of republican- 
ism. A fierce spirit of resistance not only to the prel- 
ates but to the monarch, was born. There was even 
a considerable amount of democratic sentiment. The 
poor clergy, Avho had become converted to Calvinism, 
were especially free in denouncing the inequalities of 
the old regime which made of the higher clergy great 
lords and left the humbler ministers to starve. The 
fact is that the message of Calvinism was essentially 
democratic in that the excellence of all Christians and 
their perfect equality before God was preached. In- Equality 
terest in religion and the ability to discuss it was not ^^^^^ ^ 
confined to a privileged hierarchy, but was shared 
by the humblest. In a ribald play written in 1564 it 
is said ; ^ 

If faut que Jeanne [a servant] entre les pots 

Parle de reformation ; 

La nouvelle religion 

A tant fait que les chambrieres, 

Les serviteurs et les tripieres 

En disputent publiqnement. 

But while the gay courtier and worldling sneered, at 
the religion of market women and scullerymaids, lie 
had little cause to scoff when he met the Protestants 

I Remy Belleau : La Recormue, act 4, scene 2. 



208 FRANCE 

in debate at the to^vn hall of his city, or on the field of 
battle. 

Finally, the year 1559 very well marks a stage in the 
development of French Protestantism. Until about 
1536 it had been a mere unorganized opinion, rather a 
philosophy than a coherent body. From the date of 
the publication of the Institutes to that of the Synod 
of 1559 the new church had become organized, self- 
conscious, and definitely political in aims. But after 
1559 it became more than a party; it became an im- 
perium in imperio. There was no longer one govern- 
ment and one allegiance in France but two, and the 
two were at war. 

It was just at this time that the name of Huguenot 
began to be applied to the Protestants, hitherto called 
*' Lutherans," ''heretics of Meaux" and, more rarely, 
''Calvinists." The origin of the word, first used at 
Tours in 1560, is uncertain. It may possibly come 
from ''le roi Hugiiet" or ''Hugon," a night spectre; 
the allusion then would be to the ghostly manner in 
which the heretics crept by night to their conventicles. 
Huguenot is also found as a family name at Belfort 
as early as 1425. It may possibly come from the 
term "Hausgenossen" as used in Alsace of those 
metal-workers who were not taken into the gild but 
worked at home, hence a name of contempt like the 
modern ''scab." It may also come from the name 
of the Swiss Confederation, "Eidgenossen," and per- 
haps this derivation is the most likely, though it can- 
not be considered beyond doubt. Whatever the origin 
of the name the picture of the Huguenot is familiar to 
us. Of all the fine types of French manhood, that of 
the Huguenot is one of the finest. Gallic gaiety is 
tempered Avith earnestness; intrepidity is strength- 
ened with a new moral fibre like that of steel. Except 
in the case of a few great lords, who joined the party 



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210 FRANCE 

without serious conviction, the high standard of the 
Huguenot morals was recognized even by their ene- 
mies. In an age of profligacy the ''men of the reli- 
gion," as they called themselves, walked the paths of 
rectitude and sobriety. 

§ 3. The Waks op Religion. 1559-1598 

Henry II was followed by three of his sons in suc- 
cession, each of them, in different degrees and ways, 
a weakling. The first of them was Francis II, a deli- 
cate lad of fifteen, who suffered from adenoids. Child 
as he was he had already been married for more than 
a year to Mary Stuart, a daughter of James V of 
Scotland and a niece of Francis of Guise and the 
Cardinal of Lorraine. As she was the one passion 
of the morose and feeble king, who, being legally of 
age was able to choose his own ministers, the govern- 
ment of the realm fell into the strong hands of ''the 
false brood of Lorraine." Fearing and hating these 
men above all others the Huguenots turned to the 
Bourbons for protection, but the king of Navarre was 
too weak a character to afford them much help. Find- 
ing in the press their best weapon the Protestants 
produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal 
of Lorraine as ' ' the tiger of France. ' ' 

A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated 
tyranny was that known as the Conspiracy of Amboise. 
Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la Renaudie, pledged sev- 
eral hundred Protestants to go in a body to present 
a petition to the king at Blois. How much further 
their intentions went is not known, and perhaps was 
not definitely formulated by themselves. The Vene- 
tian ambassador spoke in a contemporary dispatch 
of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he 
would not assent to their counsels, and said that the 
conspirators relied, to justify this course, on the dec- 



THE WARS OP RELIGION 211 

laration of Calvin that it was lawful to slay those who 
hindered the preaching of the gospel. Hearing of the 
conspiracy, Guise and his brother were ready. They 
transferred the court from Blois to Amboise, by which 
move they upset the plans of the petitioners and also 
put the king into a more defensible castle. Soldiers, 
assembled for the occasion, met the Huguenots as 
they advanced in a body towards Amboise, shot down The tumult 
La Eenaudie and some others on the spot and arrested Jiardi °'^^' 
the remaining twelve hundred, to be kept for subse- i560 
quent trial and execution. The suspicion that fastened 
on the prince of Conde, a brother of the king of Na- 
varre, was given some color by his frank avowal of 
sympathy with the conspirators. Though the Guises 
pressed their advantage to the utmost in forbidding 
all future assemblies of heretics, the tumult of Amboise 
was vaguely felt, in the sultry atmosphere of pent-up 
passions, to be the avant-courier of a terrific storm. 

The early death of the sickly king left the throne chariesix, 
to his brother Charles IX, a boy of nine. As he was 1560-74 
a minor, the regency fell to his mother, Catharine de' 
Medici, who for almost thirty years was the real Policy of 
ruler of France. Notwithstanding what Brantome de^Aiedici 
calls ''ung embonpoint tres-riche," she was active of 
body and mind. Her large correspondence partly re- 
veals the secrets of her power: much tact and infinite 
pains to keep in touch with as many people and as 
many details of business as possible. Her want of 
beauty was supplied by gracious manners and an ele- 
gant taste in art. As a connoisseur and an indefa- 
tigable collector she gratified her love of the magnifi- 
cent not only by beautiful palaces and gorgeous clothes, 
but in having a store of pictures, statues, tapestries, 
furniture, porcelain, silver, books, and manuscripts. 

A "politique" to her fingertips, Catharine had 
neither sympathy nor patience with the fanatics who 



212 FEANCE 

would put their religion above peace and prosperity. 
Surrounded by men as fierce as lions, she showed no 
little of the skill and intrepidity of the tamer in keep- 
ing them, for a time, from each others' throats. Soon 
after Charles ascended the throne, she was almost 
hustled into domestic and foreign war by the offer of 
Philip II of Spain to help her Catholic subjects against 
the Huguenots without her leave. She knew if that 
were done that, as she scrawled in her own peculiar 
French, ''le Roy mon fils nave jeames lantyere aubey- 
sance,"^ and she was determined "que personne ne 
pent nous brouller en lamitie en la quele je desire 
que set deus Royaumes demeurent pendant mauye."^ 
Through her goggle eyes she saw clearly where lay the 
path that she must follow. '*I am resolved," she 
wrote, "to seek by all possible means to preserve the 
authority of the king my son in all things, and at the 
same time to keep the people in peace, unity and con- 
cord, without giving them occasion to stir or to change 
anything." Fundamentally, this was the same policy 
as that of Henry IV. That she failed where he suc- 
ceeded is not due entirely to the difference in ability. 
In 1560 neither party was prepared to yield or to 
tolerate the other without a trial of strength, whereas 
a generation later many members of both parties were 
sick of war. 
December Just as Francis was dying, the States General met 
at Orleans. This body was divided into three houses, 
or estates, that of the clergy, that of the nobles, and 
that of the commons. The latter was so democratically 
chosen that even the peasants voted. "Whether they 
had voted in 1484 is not known, but it is certain that 
they did so in 1560, and that it was in the interests of 
the cro^vn to let them vote is shown by the increase in 

1 "The king my son will never have entire obedience." 
- "Tliat no one may embroil us in the friendship in which I desire 
that these two kingdoms shall remain during my lifetime." 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 213 

the number of royal officers among the deputies of the 
third estate. The peasants still regarded the king 
as their natural protector against the oppression of the 
nobles. 

The Estates were opened by Catharine's minister, 
Michael de I'Hopital. Fully sympathizing with her 
policy of conciliation, he addressed the Estates as fol- 
lows: **Let us abandon those diabolic words, names February 
of parties, factions and seditions : — Lutherans, Hugue- ' ^ ^ 
nots, Papists; let us not change the name of Chris- 
tians." Accordingly, an edict was passed granting 
an amnesty to the Huguenots, nominally for the pur- 
pose of allowing them to return to the Catholic church, 
but practically interpreted without reference to this 
proviso. 

But the government found it easier to pass edicts 
than to restrain the zealots of both parties. The 
Protestants continued to smash images; the Catholics 
to mob the Protestants. Paris became, in the words 
of Beza, ' ' the city most bloody and murderous among 
all in the world." Under the combined effects of legal 
toleration and mob persecution the HugTienots grew 
mightily in numbers and power. Their natural leader, 
the King of Navarre, indeed failed them, for he 
changed his faith several times, his real cult, as Calvin 
remarked, being that of Venus. His wife, Joan 
d'Albret, however, became an ardent Calvinist. 

At this point the government proposed a means of 
conciliation that had been tried by Charles V in Ger- 
many and had there failed. The leading theologians 
of both confessions were summoned to a colloquy at Colloquy of 
Poissy. Most of the German divines invited were pre- Augult, 1561 
vented by politics from coming, but the noted Italian 
Protestant Peter Martyr Vermigli and Theodore Beza 
of Geneva were present. The debate turned on the 
usual points at issue, and was of course indecisive, 



214 



FRANCE 



though the Huguenots did not hesitate to proclaim 
their own victory. 

January, 1562 A fresh edict of toleration had hardly been issued 
when civil war was precipitated by a horrible crime. 
Some armed retainers of the Duke of Guise, coming 

Massacre of upon a Hugucnot Congregation at Vassy in Cham- 
pagne, attacked them and murdered three hundred. 
A wild cry of fury rose from all the Calvinists; 
throughout the whole land there were riots. At Tou- 
louse, for example, fighting in the streets lasted four 
days and four hundred persons perished. It was one 
of the worst years in the history of France. A veri- 
table reign of terror prevailed everywhere, and w^hile 
the crops were destroyed famine stalked throughout 
the land. Bands of robbers and ravishers, under the 
names of Christian parties but savages at heart, put 
the whole people to ransom and to sack. Indeed, the 
Wars of Eeligion were like hell; the tongue can de- 
scribe them better than the imagination can conceive 
them. The whole sweet and pleasant land of France, 
from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was 
widowed and desolated, her pride humbled by her own 
sons and her Golden Lilies trampled in the bloody mire. 
Foreign levy was called in to supply strength to fratri- 
cidal arms. The Protestants, headed by Conde and 
Colign}^, raised an army and started negotiations with 
England. The Catholics, however, had the best of 
the fighting. They captured Rouen, defended by Eng- 
lish troops, and, under Guise, defeated the Huguenots 
under Coligny at Dreux. 

Two months later, Francis of Guise was assassinated 
by a Protestant near Orleans. Coligny was accused 
of inciting the crime, which he denied, though he con- 
fessed that he was glad of it. The immediate benefi- 
' ciary of the death of the duke was not the Huguenot, 
however, so much as Catharine de* Medici. Continu- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 215 

ing to put into practise her policy of tolerance she 
issued an edict granting liberty of conscience to all 
and liberty of worship under certain restrictions. 
Great nobles were allowed to hold meetings for divine 
service according to the refoimed manner in their 
own houses, and one village in each bailiwick was al- 
lowed to have a Protestant chapel. 

TIow consistently secular was Catharine 's policy be- 
came apparent at this time when she refused to pub- 
lish the decrees of the Council of Trent, fearing that 
they might infringe on the liberties of the Galilean 
church. In this she had the full support of most - 
French Catholics. She continued to work for religious 
peace. One of her methods was characteristic of her 
and of the time. She selected "a flying squadron" of 
twenty-four beautiful maids of honor of • high rank 
and low principles to help her seduce the refractory 
nobles on both sides. In many cases she was success- 
ful. Conde, in love with one — or possibly with several 
— of these sirens, forgot everything else, his wife, his 
party, his religion. His death in 1569 threw the lead- 
ership of the Huguenots into the steadier and stronger 
grasp of Coligny. 

But such means of dealing with a profoundly dan- 
gerous crisis were of course but the most wretched 
palliatives. The Catholic bigots would permit no 
dallying with the heretics. In 1567 they were strong 
enough to secure the disgrace of L'llopital and in the 
following year to extort a royal edict unconditionally 
forbidding the exercise of the reformed cult. The 
Huguenots again rebelled and in 1569 suffered two Huguenots 
severe defeats at Jarnac and at Moncontour. The 
Catholics were jubilant, fully believing, as Sully says, 
that at last the Protestants would have to submit. 
But nothing is more remarkable than the apparently 
slight effect of military success or failure on the 



216 FEANCE 

strength and numbers of the two faiths. *'We had 
beaten our enemies over and over again, '^ cried the 
Catholic soldier Montluc in a rage, "we were winning 
by force of arms but they triumphed by means of their 
diabolical writings. ' ^ 

The Huguenots, however, did not rely entirely on 
the pen. Their stronghold was no longer in the north 
but was now in the south and west. The reason for 
this may be partly found in the preparation of the 
soil for their seed by the medieval heresies, but still 
more in the strong particularistic spirit of that re- 
gion. The ancient provinces of Poitou and Guienne, 
Gascony and Langiiedoc, were almost as conscious of 
their southern and Provencal culture as they were 
of their French citizenship. The strength of the cen- 
tralizing tendencies lay north of the Loire ; in the south 
local privileges were more esteemed and more insisted 
upon. While Protestantism was persecuted by the 
LaRocheile government at Paris it was often protected by cities 
of the south. The most noteworthy of these w^as La 
Eochelle on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. Though 
coming late to the sui3port of the Reformation, its con- 
version was thorough and lasting. To protect the new 
religion it successfully asserted its municipal free- 
dom almost to the point of independence. Like the 
Dutch Beggars of the Sea its armed privateers preyed 
^ upon the commerce of Catholic powers, a mode of 
warfare from which the city derived immense booty. 

The Huguenots tried but failed to get foreign allies. 
Neither England nor Germany sent them any help. 
Their policy of suj)porting the revolt of the Low Coun- 
tries against Spain turned out disastrously for them- 
selves when the French under Coligny were defeated 
at Mons by the troops of Philip. 

The Catholics now believed the time ripe for a de- 
cisive blow. Under the stimulus of the Jesuits they 



THE WAES OF RELIGION 217 

had for a short time been conducting an offensive 
and effective propaganda. Leagues were formed to 
combat the organizations of the Huguenots, armed 
' ' Brotherhoods of the Holy Spirit ' ' as they were called. 
The chief obstacle in their path seemed to be a small 
group of powerful nobles headed by Coligny. Cath- 
arine and the Guises resolved to cut away this obstacle 
with the assassin's knife. Charles, who was person- 
ally on good terms with Coligny, hesitated, but he was 
too weak a youth to hold out long. There seems to 
be good reason to believe that all the queen dowager 
and her advisers contemplated was the murder of a 
few leaders and that they did not foresee one of the 
most extensive massacres in history. 

Her first attempt to have Coligny assassinated August 22, 
aroused the anger of the Huguenot leaders and made 
them more dangerous than before. A better laid and 
more comprehensive plan was therefore carried out Massacre of 
on the eve of St. Bartholomew's day. Early in the St.Barthol- 

^ '' omew, 

evening of August 23, Henry of Guise, a son of Duke August 24, 
Francis, and Coligny 's bitterest personal enemy, went to October 3 
with armed men to the house of the admiral and mur- 
dered him. From thence they proceeded to the houses 
of other prominent Huguenots to slay them in the 
same manner. News of the man-hunt spread through 
the city with instant rapidity, the mob rose and mas- 
sacred all the Huguenots they could find as well as 
a number of foreigners, principally Germans and Flem- 
ings. De Thou says that two thousand were slain in 
Paris before noon of August 24. A general pillage 
followed. 

The king hesitated to assume responsibility for so 
serious a tumult. His letters of August 24 to various 
governors of provinces and to ambassadors spoke only 
of a fray between Guise and Coligny, and stated that 
be wished to preserve order. But with these very 



218 FRANCE 

letters he sent messengers to all quarters with verbal 
orders to kill all the leading Protestants. On August 
27 he again wrote of it as *'a great and lamentable 
sedition" originating in the desire of Guise to revenge 
his father on Coligny. The king said that the fury 
of the populace was such that he was unable to bring 
the remedy he wished, and he again issued directions 
for the preservation of order. But at the same time 
he declared that the Guises had acted at his command 
to punish those who had conspired against him and 
against the old religion. In fact, he gave out a rapid 
series of contradictory accounts and orders, and in 
the meantime, from August 25 to October 3 terrible 
series of massacres took place in almost all the prov- 
inces. Two hundred Huguenots perished at Meaux, 
from 500 to 1000 at Orleans, a much larger number 
at Lyons. It is difficult to estimate the total number 
of victims. Sully, who narrowly escaped, says that 
70,000 were slain. Hotman, another contemporary, 
says 50,000. Knowing hoAv much figures are apt to 
be exaggerated even by judicious men, we must as- 
sume that this number is too large. On the other hand 
the lowest estimate given by modern Catholic investi- 
gators, 5000, is certainly too small. Probably between 
10,000 and 20,000 is correct. Those who fell were the 
flower of the party. 

AVliatever may have been the precise degree of guilt 
of the French rulers, which in any case was very grave, 
they took no pains to conceal their exultation over an 
event that had at last, as they believed, ground their 
enemies to powder. In jubilant tone Catharine wrote 
to her son-in-law, Philip of Spain, that God had given 
her son the king of France the means *'of wiping out 
those of his subjects who were rebellious to God and 
to himself." Philip sent his hearty congratulations 
and heard a Te Deum sung. The pope struck a medal 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 219 

with, a picture of an avenging angel and the legend, 
''Ugonotorum strages," and ordered an annual Te 
Deum which was, in fact, celebrated for a long time. 
But on the other hand a cry of horror arose from 
Germany and England. Elizabeth received the French 
ambassador dressed in mourning and declared to him 
that 'Hhe deed had been too bloody.'^ 

Though the triumph of the Catholics was loudly 
shouted, it was not as complete as they hoped. The 
Huguenots seemed cowed for a moment, but nothing, 
is more remarkable than the constancy of the people. 
Recantations were extremely few. The Reformed pas- 
tors, nourished on the Old Testament, saw in the af- 
fliction that had befallen them nothing but the means 
of proving the faithful. Preparations for resistance 
were made at once in the principal cities of the south. 
La Rochelle, besieged by the royal troops, evinced a siege of 
heroism worthy of the cause. While the men repulsed 
the furious assaults of the enemy the women built up 
the walls that crumbled under the powerful fire of the 
artillery. A faction of citizens who demanded sur- 
render was sternh^ suppressed and the city held out 
until relief came from an unhoped quarter. The king's 
brother, Henry Duke of Anjou, was elected to the 
throne of Poland on condition that he would allow 
liberty of conscience to Polish Protestants. In order 
to appear consistent the French goverimient therefore 
stopped for the moment the persecution of the Hugue- 
nots. The siege of La Rochelle was abandoned and 
a treaty made allowing liberty of worship in that city, 
in Nimes and Montauban and in the houses of some 
of the great nobles. 

In less than two years after the appalling massacre 
the Protestants were again strong and active. A chant 
of victory sounded from their dauntless ranks. More 
than ever before they became republican in principle. 



La Rochelle 



220 FEANCE 

Their pamphleteers, among them Hotman, fiercely at- 
tacked the government of Catharine, and asserted their 
rights. 

Charles was a consumptive. The hemorrhages 
characteristic of his disease reminded him of the tor- 
rents of blood that he had caused to flow from his coun- 
' try. Broken in body and haunted by superstitious 
terrors the wretched man died on May 30, 1574. 
Henry III, He was succecdcd by his brother, Henry III, re- 
1547-89 _ cently elected king of Poland, a man of good parts, 
(7^' ^fj interested in culture and in study, a natural orator, 
^^^^^■^^f^^ not destitute of intelligence. His mother's pet and 
spoiled child, brought up among the girls of the ''fly- 
ing squadron," he was in a continual state of nerv- 
ous and sensual titillation that made him avid of ex- 
citement and yet unable to endure it. A thunderstorm 
drove him to hide in the cellar and to tears. He was 
at times overcome by fear of death and hell, and at 
times had crises of religious fervour. But his life 
was a perpetual debauch, ever seeking new forms of 
pleasure in strange ways. He would walk the streets 
at night accompanied by gay young rufflers in search 
of adventures. He had a passion for some handsome 
young men, commonly called * ' the darlings, ' ' whom he 
kept about him dressed as women. 

His reign meant a new lease of power to his mother, 
who worshipped him and to whom he willingly left 
the arduous business of government. By this time 
she was bitterly hated by the Huguenots, who paid 
their compliments to her in a pamphlet entitled A 
wonderful Discourse on the Life, Deeds and Debauch- 
ery of Catharine de' Medici, perhaps written in part 
by the scholar Henry Estienne. She was accused not 
only of crimes of which she was really guilty, like the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew, but of having mur- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 221 

dered the dauphin Francis, her husband's elder brother, 
and others who had died natural deaths, and of having 
systematically depraved her children in order to keep 
the reins of authority in her own hands. 

Frightened by the odium in which his mother was 
held, Henry III thought it wise to disavow all part 
or lot in St. Bartholomew and to'concede to the Hugue- 
nots liberty of worship everywhere save in Paris and . 
in whatever place the court might be for the moment. 

So difficult was the position of the king that by this 
attempt to conciliate his enemies he only alienated his 
friends. The bigoted Catholics, finding the crown im- 
potent, began to take energetic measures to help them- 
selves. In 1576 they formed a League to secure the 
benefit of association. Henry Duke of Guise drew up 
the declaration that formed the constituent act of the The League 
League. It proposed ''to establish the law of God 
in its entirety, to reinstate and maintain divine serv- 
ice according to the form and manner of the holy, 
Catholic and apostolic church," and also "to restore 
to the provinces and estates of this kingdom the rights, 
privileges, franchises, and ancient liberties such as 
they were in the time of King Clovis, the first Chris- 
tian king." This last clause is highly significant as 
showing how the Catholics had now adopted the tactics 
of the Huguenots in appealing from the central govern- 
ment to the provincial privileges. It is exactly the 
same issue as that of Federalism versus States' Rights 
in American history; the party in power emphasizes 
the national authority, while the smaller divisions 
furnish a refuge for the minority. 

The constituency of the League rapidly became large. 
The declaration of Guise was circulated throughout 
the country something like a monster petition, and 
those who wished bound themselves to support it. The 



222 FRANCE 

power of tliis association of Catholics among nobles and 
people soon made it so formidable that Henry III re- 
versed his former jDolicy, recognized the League and 

Estates Gen- declared himself its head. 

eralofBlois rj^j^^ elections for the States General held at Blois 
in 1576 proved highly favorable to the League. The 
chief reason for their overwhelming success was the 
abstention of the Protestants from voting. In con- 
tinental Europe it has always been and is now common 
for minorities to refuse to vote, the idea being that this 
refusal is in itself a protest more effective than a defi- 
nite minority vote would be. To an American this 
seems strange, for it has been proved time and again 
that a strong minority can do a great deal to shape 
legislation. But the Hnguenots reasoned differently, 
and so seated but one Protestant in the whole assem- 
bly, a depnty to the second, or noble, estate. The priv- 
ileged orders pronounced immediately for the enforce- 
ment of religious nnity, but in the Third Estate there 
was a warm debate. John Bodin, the famous pub- 
licist, though a Catholic, pleaded hard for tolerance. 
As finally passed, the law demanded a return to the 
old religion, but added the proviso that the means 
taken should be '* gentle and pacific and without war." 
So impossible was this in practice that the government 
was again obliged to issne a decree granting liberty of 

15T7 conscience and restricted liberty of worship. 

Under the oppression of the ruinous civil wars the 
people began to grow more and more restless. The 
king was extremely unpopular. Perhaps the people 
might have winked even at snch outrages against de- 
cency as were perpetrated by the king had not their 
critical faculties been sharpened by the growing misery 
of their condition. The wars had bankrupted both 
them and the government, and the desperate expedients 
of the latter to raise money only increased the poverty 



THE WARS OF EELIGION 223 

of the masses. Every estate, every province, was 
urged to contribute as much as possible, and most of 
them replied, in humble and loyal tone, but firmly, 
begging for relief from the ruinous exactions. The 
sale of offices, of justice, of collector ships of taxes, 
of the administration, of the army, of the public do- 
main, was only less onerous than the sale of monop- 
olies and inspectorships of markets and ports. The 
only prosperous class seemed to be the government 
agents and contractors. In fact, for the first time in 
the history of France the people were becoming thor- 
oughly disafifected and some of them semi-republican 
in feeling. 

The king had no sons and when his only remaining ^^^ 
brother died a new element of discord and perplexity 
was introduced in that the heir to the throne, Henry 
of Xavarre, was a Protestant. Violent attacks on him 
were published in the pamphlet press. The League 
was revived in stronger form than before. Its head, 
Guise, selected as candidate for the throne the uncle 
of Henry of Xavarre, Charles, Cardiaal of Bourbon, 
a stupid and violent man of sixty-four. The king 
hastened to make terms with the League and com- 
manded all Protestants to leave the country in six 
months. At this point the pope intervened to 
strengthen his cause by issuing the ' ' Bull of Depriva- ^^^ 
tion" declaring Henry of Xavarre incapable, as a 
heretic, of succeeding to the throne. Xavarre at once 
denounced the buU as contrary to French law and 
invalid, and he was supported both by the Parlement 
of Paris and by some able pamphleteers. Hotman 
published his attack on the ''vain and blind fulmina- 
tion" of the pontiff. 

An appeal to arms was inevitable. At the battle of Q,aJas. 
Coutras, the Huguenots, led by Henry of Xavarre, October 20, 
won their first victorv. While this increased Xa- •^^^ 



224 FRANCE 

varre^s power and his popularity with his followers, 
the majority of the people rallied to the League. In 
the ''war of the three Henrys" as it was called, the 
king had more to fear from Henry of Guise than from 
the Huguenot. Cooped up at the Tuileries the mon- 
arch was under so irksome a restraint that he was 
finally obliged to regain freedom by flight, on May 12, 
1588. The elections for the States General gave an 
enormous majority to the League. In an evil hour for 
himself the king resorted again to that much used 
weapon, assassination. By his order Guise was mur- 
dered. "Now I am king," he wrote with a sigh of 
relief. But he was mistaken. The League, more hos- 
tile than ever, swearing to avenge the death of its cap- 
tain, was now frankly revolutionary. 

It continued to exercise its authority under the lead- 
ership of a Committee of Sixteen. These gentlemen 
purged the still royalist Parlement of Paris. By the 
hostility of the League the king was forced to an alli- 
ance with Henry of Navarre. This is interesting as 
showing how completely the position of the two lead- 
ing parties had become reversed. The throne, once 
the strongest ally of the church, was now supported 
chiefly by the Huguenots who had formerly been in re- 
-^ bellion. Indeed by this time "the wars of religion" 

had become to a very large extent dynastic and social. 

On August 1, 1589, the king was assassinated by a 
Dominican fanatic. His death was preceded shortly 
by that of Catharine de' Medici. 
Henry IV, Henry IV was a man of thirty-five, of middle stature, 
but very hardy and brave. He was one of the most 
y intelligent of the French kings, vigorous of brain as of 
body. Few could resist his delicate compliments and 
the promises he knew how to lavish. The glamour of 
his personality has survived even until now. In a song 
still popular he is called "the gallant king who knew 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 225 

how to fight, to make love and to drink." He is also 
remembered for his wish that every peasant might have 
a fowl in his pot. His supreme desire was to see 
France, bleeding and impoverished by civil war, again 
united, strong and happy. He consistently subordi- 
nated religion to political ends. To him almost alone 
is due the final adoption of tolerance, not indeed as a ' 
natural right, but as a political expedient. 

The difficulties with which he had to contend were 
enormous. The Catholics, headed by the Duke of 
Mayenne, a brother of Guise, agreed to recognize him 
for six months in order that he might have the oppor- 
tunity of becoming reconciled to the church. But 
■Mayenne, who wished to be elected king by the States 
General, soon commenced hostilities. The skirmish 
at Arques between the forces of Henry and Mayenne, 
resulting favorably to the former, was followed by 
the battle of Ivry. Henrj^, with two thousand horse Battle of 
and eight thousand foot, against eight thousand horse 14^^590^'^*^ 
and twelve thousand foot of the League, addressed his 
soldiers in a stirring oration: ''God is with us. Be- 
hold his enemies and ours; behold your king. 
Charge ! If your standards fail you, rally to my white 
plume; you will find it on the road to victory and 
honor." At first the fortune of war went against the 
Huguenots, but the personal courage of the king, who, 
with ''a terrible white plume" in his helmet led his 
cavalry to the attack, wrested victory from the foe. 

From Ivry Henry marched to Paris, the headquar- Siege of 
ters of the League. AVith thirteen thousand soldiers 
he besieged this town of 220,000 inhabitants, garri- 
soned by fifty thousand troops. With their usual self- 
sacrificing devotion, the people of Paris held out 
against the horrors of famine. The clergj^ aroused 
the fanaticism of the populace, promising heaven to 
those who died ; women protested that they would eat 



226 FEANCE 

their children before they would surrender. With 
provisions for one month, Paris held out for four. 
Dogs, cats, rats, and grass were eaten; the bones of 
animals and even of dead people were ground up and 
used for flour; the skins of animals were devoured. 
Thirteen thousand persons died of hunger and twenty 
thousand of the fever brought on by lack of food. 
But even this miracle of fanaticism could not have 
saved the capital eventually, but for the timely inva- 
sion of France from the north by the Duke of Parma, 
who joined Mayenne on the Mame. Henry raised the 
siege to meet the new menace, but the campaign of 
1591 was fruitless for both sides. 

Anarchy France seemed to be in a state of anarchy under the 

operation of many and various forces. Pope Gregory 
XIV tried to influence the Catholics to unite against 
Henry, but he was met by protests from the Parle- 
ments in the name of the Galilean Liberties. The 
''Politiques" were ready to support any strong de 
facto government, but could not find it. The cities 
hated the nobles, and the republicans resented the 
''courteous warfare'^ which either side was said to 
wage on the other, sparing each other's nobles and 
slaughtering the commons. 

1593 At this point the States General were convoked at 

Paris by the League. So many provinces refused to 
send deputies that there were only 128 members out 
of a normal 505. A serial publication by several au- 
thors, called the Satyre Menippee, poured ridicule on 
the pretentions of the national assemblj^ Various so- 
lutions of the deadlock were proposed. Philip II of 
Spain offered to support Mayenne as Lieutenant Gen- 
eral of France if the League would make his daughter, 
as the heiress through her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, 
queen. This being refused, Philip next proposed that 
the young Duke of Guise should marry his daughter 



conversion 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 227 

and become king. But this proposal also won little 
support. The enemies of Henry IV were conscious 
of his legitimate rights and jealous of foreign inter- 
ference ; the only thing that stood in the way of their 
recognizing him was his heresy. 

Henry, finding that there seemed no other issue to Henry's 
an intolerable situation, at last resolved, though Avith 
much reluctance, to change his religion. On July 25, 
1593, he abjured the Protestant faith, kneeling to the 
Archbishop of Bourges, and was received into the 
bosom of the Roman church. That his conversion 
was due entirely to the belief that "Paris was worth 
a mass" is, of course, plain. Indeed, he frankly 
avowed that he still scrupled at some articles, such as 
purgatory, the worship of the saints, and the power of 
the pope. And it must be remembered that his mo- 
tives were not purely selfish. The alternative seemed 
to be indefinite civil war with all its horrors, and 
Henry deliberately but regretfully sacrificed his con- 
fessional convictions on the altar of his country. 

The step was not immediately successful. The 
Huguenots were naturally enraged. The Catholics 
doubted the king's sincerity. At Paris the preachers 
of the League ridiculed the conversion from the pulpit. 
"My dog," sneered one of them, "were you not at 
mass last Sunday? Come here and let us offer you 
the crown." But the "politiques" rallied to the 
throne and the League rapidly melted away. The 
Satyre Menipi)ee, supporting the interests of Henry, 
did much to turn public opinion in his favor. 

A further impression was made by his coronation 
at Chartres in 1594. When the surrender of Paris 
followed, the king entered his capital to receive the 
homage of the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris. 
Tlie su})erstitious were convinced of Henry's sincerity 
when he touched some scrofulous persons and they 



228 FRANCE 

were said to be healed. Curing the ''king's evil" was 
one of the oldest attributes of royalty, and it could 
not be imagined that it would descend to an impostor. 
Henry showed the wisest statesmanship in consoli- 
dating his power. He bought up those who still held 
out against him at their own price, remarking that 
whatever it cost it would be cheaper than fighting 
them. He showed a wise clemency in dealing with his 
enemies, banishing only about 130 persons. Next 
came absolution by Pope Clement VIII, who, after 
driving as hard a bargain as he could, finally granted 
it on September 17, 1595. 

But even yet all danger was not past. Enraged at 
seeing France escape from his clutches, Philip of 
Spain declared war, and he could still count on the 
support of Mayenne and the last remnant of the 
League. The daring action of Henry at Fontaine- 
Frangaise on June 5, 1595, where with three hundred 
horse he routed twelve hundred Spaniards, so dis- 
couraged his enemies that Mayenne hastened to sub- 
mit, and peace was signed with Spain in 1598. The 
finances of the realm, naturally in a chaotic state, were 
brought to order and solvency by a Huguenot noble, 
the Duke of Sully, Henry's ablest minister. 

The legal status of the Protestants was still to be 
settled. It was not changed by Henry's abjuration, 
and the king was determined at all costs to avoid 
another civil war. He therefore published the Edict 
Edict of of Nantes, declared to be perpetual and irrevocable. 
April 13, ^y i^ liberty of conscience was granted to all ''without 
1598 being questioned, vexed or molested," and without 

being "forced to do anything contrary to their reli- 
gion." Liberty of worship was conceded in all places 
in which it had been practised for the last two years ; 
i.e. in two places in every bailiwick except large towns, 
where services were to be held outside the walls, and 



THE WARS OF EELIGION 229 

in the houses of the great nobles. Protestant wor- 
ship was forbidden at Paris and for five leagues 
(twelve and one-half miles) outside the walls. Prot- 
estants had all other legal rights of Catholics and 
were eligible to all offices. To secure them in these 
rights a separate court of justice was instituted, a 
division of the Parlement of Paris to be called the 
Edict Chamber and to consist of ten Catholic and six 
Protestant judges. But a still stronger guarantee was 
given in their recognition as a separately organized 
state within the state. The king agreed to leave two 
hundred towns in their hands, some of which, like 
OVIontpellier, INIontauban, and La Rochelle, were for- 
tresses in which they kept garrisons and paid the gov- 
ernors. As they could raise 25,000 soldiers at a time 
when the national army in time of peace was only 
10,000, their position seemed absolutely impregnable. 
So favorable was the Edict to the Huguenots that it 
was bitterly opposed by the Catholic clergy and by the 
Parlement of Paris. Only the personal insistence of 
the king finally carried it. 

Protestantism was stronger in the sixteenth cen- Reasons for 
tury in France than it ever was thereafter. During fa>i"reof 
the eighty-seven years while the Edict of Nantes was protestant- 
in force it lost much ground, and when that Edict was ^sm 
revoked by a doting king and persecution began afresh, 
the Huguenots were in no condition to resist. From 
a total constituency at its maximum of perhaps a fifth 1685 
or a sixth of the whole population, the Protestants 
have now sunk to less than two per cent. (650,000 out 
of 39,000,000). The history of the rise and decline of 
the Huguenot movement is a melancholy record of per- 
secution and of heroism. How great the number of 
martyrs was can never be known accurately. Apart 
from St. Bartholomew there were several lesser mas- 
sacres, the wear and tear of a generation of war, and 



230 



FEANCE 



Hostility of 
the Gov- 
ernment 



Protestant- 
ism came 
too late 



the unremitting pressure of the law that claimed hun- 
dreds of victims a year. 

Three principal causes can be assigned for the fail- 
ure of the Reformation to do more than fight a drawn 
battle in France. The first and least important of 
these was the steady hostility of the government. 
This hostility was assured by the mutually advan- 
tageous alliance between the throne and the church 
sealed in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. But that 
the opposition of the government, heavily as it 
weighed, was not and could not be the decisive force 
in defeating Protestantism is proved, in my judgment, 
by the fact that even when the Huguenots had a king 
of their own persuasion they were unable to obtain 
the mastery. Had their faith won the support not 
only of a considerable minority, but of the actual ma- 
jority of the people, they could surely at this time 
have secured the government and made France a Prot- 
estant state. 

The second cause of the final failure of the Refor- 
mation was the tardiness with which it came to 
France. It did not begin to make its really popular 
appeal until some years after 1536, when Calvin's 
writings attained a gradual publicity. This was 
twenty years later than the Reformation came forcibly 
home to the Germans, and in those twenty years it had 
made its greatest conquests north of the Rhine. Of 
causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide 
in their affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to 
fortune, but which, once missed, ebbs to defeat. 
Every generation has a different interest; to every 
era the ideals of that immediately preceding become 
stale and old-fashioned. The writings of every age 
are a polemic against those of their fathers; every 
dogma has its day, and after every wave of enthusiam 
a reaction sets in. Thus it was that the Reformation 



THE WAKS OF RELIGION 231 

missed, though it narrowly missed, the propitious mo- 
ment for conquering France. Enough had been said 
of it during the reign of Francis to make the people 
tired of it, but not enough to make them embrace it. 
By the time that Calvin had become well kno^vn, the 
Catholics had awakened and had seized many of the 
weapons of their opponents, a fresh statement of be- 
lief, a new enthusiasm, a reformed ethical standard. 
The Council of Trent, the Jesuits, the other new orders, 
were only symptoms of a still more widely prevalent 
Catholic revival that came, in France, just in the nick 
of time to deprive the Protestants of many of their 
claims to popular favor. 

But probably the heaviest weight in the scale against. Beaten by 
the Reformation was the Renaissance — far stronger in ^^^^^^ 
France than in Germany. The one marched from the 
north, while the other was wafted up from Italy. 
They met, not as hostile armies but rather — to use a 
humble, commercial illustration — as two competing 
merchants. The goods they offered were not the same, 
not even similar, but the appeal of each was of such a 
nature that few minds could be the whole-hearted 
devotees of both. The new learning and the beauties 
of Italian art and literature sapped away the interest 
of just those intelligent classes whose support was 
needed to make the triumph of the Reformation com- 
plete. Terrible as were the losses of the Huguenots 
by lire and sword, considerable as were the defections 
from their ranks of those who found in the reformed 
Catholic church a spiritual refuge, still greater was the 
loss of the Protestant cause in failing to secure the 
adherence of such minds as Dolet and Rabelais, Ron- 
sard and Montaigne, and of the thousands influenced 
by them. And a study of just these men will show 
how the Italian influence worked and how it grew 
stronger in its rivalry M^th the religious interest. 



232 FRANCE 

Whereas Marot had found something to interest him 
in the new doctrines, Ronsard bitterly hated them. 
Passionately devoted, as he and the rest of the Pleiade 
were, to the sensuous beauties of Italian poetry, he had 
neither understanding of nor patience with dogmatic 
subtleties. In the Huguenots he saw nothing but mad 
fanatics and dangerous fomentors of rebellion. In his 
Discourses on the Evils of the Times, he laid all the 
woes of France at the door of the innovators. And 
powerfully his greater lyrics seduced the mind of the 
public from the contemplation of divinity to the en- 
joyment of earthly beauty. 

The same intensification of the contrast between 
the two spirits is seen in comparing Montaigne with 
Rabelais. It is true that Rabelais ridiculed all posi- 
tive religion, but nevertheless it fascinated him. His 
theological learning is remarkable. But Montaigne 
ignored religion as far as possible. Nourished from 
his earliest youth on the great classical writers, he had 
Montaigne's no interest apart from ''the kingdom of man." He 
a oo ness preferred to remain in the old faith because that course 
caused him the least trouble. He had no sympathy 
with the Protestants, but he did not hate them, as did 
Ronsard. During the wars of religion, he maintained 
friendly relations with the leaders of both parties. 
And he could not believe that creed was the real cause 
of the civil strife. "Take from the Catholic army," 
said he, ''all those actuated by pure zeal for the church 
or for the king and country, and you will not have 
enough men left to form one company. " It is strange 
that beneath the evil passions and self-seeking of the 
champions of each party he could not see the fierce 
flame of popular heroism and fanaticism ; but that he, 
and thousands of men like him, could not do so, and 
could not enter, even by imagination, into the causes 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 233 

which, but a half century earlier, had set the world on 
fire, largely explains how the religious issue had lost 
its savour and why Protestantism failed in France. 



CHAPTER V 
THE NETHERLANDS 

§ 1. The Lutheean Reform 

TheNeth- The Netherlands have always been a favorite topic 
for the speculation of those philosophers who derive a 
large part of national character from geographical 
conditions. A land that needed reclaiming from the 
sea by hard labor, a country situated at those two great 
outlets of European commerce, the mouths of the Rhine 
and the Scheldt, a borderland between German and 
Latin culture, naturally moulded a brave, stubborn, 
practical and intelligent people, destined to play in 
history a part seemingly beyond their scope and re- 
sources. 

The people of the Netherlands became, to all in- 
tents, a state before they became a nation. The Bur- 
gundian dukes of the fourteenth and fifteenth century 
added to their fiefs counties, dukedoms and bishoprics, 
around the nucleus of their first domain, until they had 
Philip the forged a compact and powerful realm. Philip the 
1419-67 Grood, Duke of Burgundy and lord, under various titles, 
of much of the Netherlands, deserved the title of Con- 
ditor Belgii by his successful wars on France and by 
his statesmanlike policy of centralization. To foster 
unity he created the States General — ^borrowing the 
name and function thereof from France — in which all 
of tlie seventeen provinces ^ of the Netherlands were 
represented on great occasions. Continually increas- 

1 Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, Guelders, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, 
Holland, Zecland, Malines, Namur, Lille, Tournay, Friesland, Utrecht, 
Overyssel and Groningen. 

234 



THE LUTHERAN EEFORM 235 

ing in power with reference to the various localities, it 
remained subordinate to the prince, who had the sole 
right of initiating legislation. At first it met now in 
one city, then in another, but after 1530 always con- 
vened at Brussels, and always used the French lan- 
guage officially. 

Charles the Bold completed and yet endangered the Charles the 
work of Philip, for he was worsted in mortal strife ii^ylyy 
with Louis XI of France and, dying in battle, left his 
dominions to his daughter, Mary. Her husband, the 
Emperor Maximilian, and her son, Philip the Hand- Maximilian, 

. . 1477-93 

some, added to her realms those vast dominions that phiUpthe 
made her grandson, Charles, the greatest potentate in Handsome, 
Europe. Born in Ghent, reared in the Netherlands, 
and speaking only the French of the Walloons, Charles 
was always regarded by his subjects as one of them- 
selves. He almost completed the unification of the 
Burgundian state by the conquest of Tournay from 
France (1521), and the annexation of the independent 
provinces of Friesland (1523), Overyssel and Utrecht 
(1528), Groningen (1536) and Guelders (1543). Liege 
still remained a separate entity under its prince- 
bishops. But even under Charles, notwithstanding a 
general feeling of loyalty to the house of Hapsburg, 
each province was more conscious of its o^^^l individ- 
uality than were the people as a whole of common pa- 
triotism. Some of the provinces lay within the Em- 
pire, others were vassals of France, a few were inde- 
pendent. Dutch was regarded as a dialect of German. 
The most illustrious Netherlander of the time, Eras- 
mus, in discussing his race, does not even contemplate 
the possibility of there being a nation composed of 
Dutch and Flemish men. The only alternative that 
presents itself to him is whether ho is French or Ger- 
man and, having been born at Rotterdam, he decides 
in favor of the latter. 



236 THE NETHEELANDS 

Classes The Burguiidiaii princes found their chief support 

in the nobility, in a numerous class of officials, and in 
the municipal aristocracies. The nobles, transformed 
from a feudal caste to a court clique, even though they 
retained, as satellites of the monarch, much wealth 
and power, had relatively lost ground to the rising pre- 
tensions of the cities and of the commercial class. The 
clergy, too, were losing their old independence in sub- 
servience to a government which regulated their tithes 
and forbade their indulgence-trade. In 1515 Charles 
secured from Leo X and again in 1530 from Clement 
VII the right of nomination to vacant benefices. He 
was able to make of the bishops his tools and to cur- 
tail the freedom, jurisdiction,, and financial privileges 
of the clergy considerably because the spiritual estate 
had lost favor with the people and received no support 
from them. 

As the two privileged classes surrendered their pow- 
ers to the monarch, the third estate was coming into 
its own. Not until the war of independence, however, 
was it able to withstand the combination of bureaucracy 
and plutocracy that made common cause with the cen- 
tral government against the local rights of the cities 
and the customary privileges of the gilds. Almost 
everywhere the prince was able, with the tacit support 
of the wealthier burghers, to substitute for the officers 
elected by the gilds his own commissioners. But this 

Ghent '^ usurpation, together with a variety of economic ills for 
which the commoners were inclined, quite wrongly, to 
blame the government, caused general discontent and 
in one case open rebellion. The gilds of Ghent, a 
proud and ancient city, suffering from the encroach- 
ments of capitalism and from the decline of the Flem- 
ish cloth industry, had long asserted among their rights 
that of each gild to refuse to pay one of the taxes, any 

1539 one it chose, levied by the government. The attempt 



THE LUTHERAN EEFORM 237 

of the government to suppress this privilege caused a 
rising which took the characteristically modern form 
of a general strike. The regent of the Netherlands, 
Mary, yielded at first to the demands of the gilds, as 
she had no means of coercion convenient. Charles was 
in Spain at the time, but hurried northward, being 
granted free passage through France by the king w^ho 
felt he had an interest in aiding his fellow monarch 
to put dowTi rebellious subjects. Early in 1540 Charles 
entered Ghent at the head of a sufficient army. He 
soon meted out a sanguinary punishment to the 
** brawlers'* as the strikers were called, humbled the 
city government, deprived it of all local privileges, 
suppressed all independent corporations, asserted the 
royal prerogative of nominating aldermen, and erected 
a fortress to overawe the burghers. Thus the only 
overt attempt to resist the authority of Charles V, 
apart from one or two insignificant Anabaptist riots, 
was crushed. 

In matters of foreign policy the people of the Nether- 
lands naturally wished to be g-uided in reference to 
their own interests and not to the larger interests of 
the emperor's other domains. Wielding immense 
wealth — during the middle decades of the sixteenth 
century Antwerp was both the first port and the first 
money-market of Europe — and cherishing the senti- 
ment that Charles was a native of their land, they for 
some time sweetly flattered themselves that their in- 
terests w^ere the center around which gravitated the 
desires and needs of the Empire and of Spain. In- 
deed, the balance of these two great states, and the 
regency of Margaret of Austria, a Hapsburg deter- Margaret of 
mined to give the Netherlands their due, for a time al- Regent, 
lowed them at least the semblance of getting their 1522-31 
wishes. But w^hen Charles 's sister, Mary of Hungary, 
succeeded Margaret as regent, she was too entirely de- 



238 THE NETHERLANDS 

pendent on her brother, and he too determined to con- 
sult larger than Burgundian interests, to allow the 
Netherlands more than the smallest weight in larger 
plans. The most that she could do was to unify, cen- 
tralize and add to the provinces, and to get what com- 
mercial advantages treaties could secure. Thus, she 
redeemed Luxemburg from the Margrave of Baden to 
whom Maximilian had pawned it. Thus, also, she ne- 
gotiated fresh commercial treaties with England and 
unified the coinage. But with all these achievements, 
distinctly advantageous to the people she governed, 
her efforts to increase the poAver of the crown and the 
necessity she was under of subordinating her policy 
to that of Germany and Spain, made her extremely un- 
popular. 

The relationship of the Netherlands to the Empire 
was a delicate and important question. Though the 
Empire was the feudal suzerain of most of the Bur- 
gundian provinces, Charles felt far more keenly for 
his rights as an hereditary, local prince than for the 
aggrandizement of his Empire, and therefore tried, 
especially after he had left Austria to his brother 
September Ferdinand, to loosen rather than to strengthen the 
7, 1522 bond. Even as early as 1512, when the Imperial Diet 
demanded that the "common penny" be levied in the 
Netherlands, Charles's council aided and abetted his 
Burgundian subjects in refusing to pay it. In 1530 
the Netherlands, in spite of urgent complaints from the 
Diet, completely freed itself from imperial jurisdic- 
tion in the administration of justice. Matters became 
still more complicated when Utrecht, Friesland, Gro- 
ningen and Guelders, formerly belonging to the West- 
phalian district of the Empire, were annexed by 
Charles as Burgundian prince. Probably he would not 
have been able to vindicate these acts of jDower, had 
1547 not his victory at Miihlberg freed him from the re- 



THE LUTHERAN REFORM 239 

straints of the imperial constitution. A convention 
was made at the next Diet of Augsburg, providing 
that henceforth the Netherlands should form a sep- 
arate district, the ''Burgundian circle," of the Empire, Convention 
and that their prince, as such, should be represented 26,1548 
in the Diet and in the Imperial Supreme Court. Taxes 
were so apportioned that in time of peace the Nether- 
lands should contribute to the imperial treasury as 
much as did two electors, and in time of war as much 
as three. This treaty nominally added to the Empire 
two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the 
whole Netherlands the benefit of imperial protection. 
But, though ratified by the States General promptly, 
the convention remained almost a dead letter, and 
loft the Netherlands virtually autonomous. As long 
as they were unmolested the Netherlands forgot their 
union entirely, and when, under the pressure of Span- 
ish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by 
it, they found that the Empire had no wish to revive 
it. 

The general causes of the religious revolution were ^eforma- 

tion 

the same in the Low Countries as in other lands. The 
ground was prepared by the mystics of the earlier 
ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, 
and by the Renaissance. The central situation of the 
country made it especially open to all currents of Eu- 
ropean thought. Printing was early introduced from 
Germany and expanded so rapidly in these years that 1525-55 
no less than fifty new publishing houses were erected. 
As Antwerp was the most cosmopolitan of cities, so 
Erasmus was the most nearly the citizen of the world 
in that era. The great humanist, who did so much to 
prepare for the Reformation, spent in his native land 
just those early years of its first appearance when he 
most favored Luther. 



240 THE NETHERLANDS 

A group to take up with the Wittenberg professor's 
doctrines were the Augustinians, many of whom 
had been in close relations with the Saxon friar- 
ies. One of them, James Probst, had been prior of 

1515 "Wittenberg where he learned to know Luther well and 

when he became prior of the convent at Antwerp he 

^^^^ started a rousing propaganda in favor of the reform. 

Another Augustinian, Henry of Ziitphen, made his 
friary at Dordrecht the center of a Lutheran move- 
ment. Hoen at the Hague, Hinne Rode at Utrecht, 
Gerard Lister at Zwolle, Melchior Miritzsch at Ghent, 
were soon in correspondence with Luther and became 
missionaries of his faith. His books, which circulated 
among the learned in Latin, were some of them trans- 
lated into Dutch as early as 1520. 

The German commercial colony at Antwerp was 
another channel for the infiltration of the Lutheran 
gospel. The many travelers, among them Albert 

1520-1 Diirer, brought with them tidings of the revolt and 
sowed its seeds in the soil of Flanders and Holland. 
Singularly enough, the colony of Portuguese Jews, the 
Marranos as they were called, became, if not converts, 
at least active agents in the dissemination of Lutheran 
works. 

Catholic ^ vigorous couutcr-propaganda was at once started 

answers . on rm • t i ^ 

by the partisans ot the pope. This was directed 
against both Erasmus and Luther and consisted 
largely, according to the reports of the former, in the 
most violent invective. Nicholas of Egmont, ''a man 
with a white pall but a black heart" stormed in the 
pulpit against the new heretics. Another man inter- 
spersed a sermon on charity with objurgations against 
1533 those whom he called "geese, asses, stocks, and Anti- 

christs." One Dominican said he wished he could 
fasten his teeth in Luther's throat, for he would not 
fear to go to the Lord's supper with that blood on his 



THE LUTHERAN REFORM 241 

mouth. It was at Antwerp, a little later, that were 
first coined, or at least first printed, the so celebrated 
epigrams that Erasmus was Luther's father, that 
Erasmus had laid the eggs and Luther had hatched the 
chickens, and that Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and 
Erasmus were the four soldiers who had crucified 
Christ. 

The principal literary opposition to the new doc- 
trines came from the University of Louvain. Luther's 
works were condemned by Cologne, and this sentence 
was ratified by Louvain. A number of the leading pro- 15"!"^ ' 
fessors w^ote against him, among them the ex-pro- November? 
fessor Adrian of Utrecht, recently created Bishop of 
Tortosa and cardinal, and soon to be pope. 

The conservatives, however, could do little but scold 
until the arrival of Charles V in June 1520, and of the 
papal nuncio Aleander in September. The latter saw 
Charles immediately at Antweri? and found him al- 
ready determined to resist heresy. Acting under the 
edict procured at that time, though not published 
until the following March 22, Aleander busied himself 
by going around and burning Lutheran works in vari- P.'''°^^''' 
ous cities and preaching against the heresy. He 
found far more opposition than one would think prob- 
able, and the burning of the books, as Erasmus said, 
removed them from the bookstores only, not from the 
hearts of the people. The nuncio even discovered, he 
said, at this early date, heretics who denied the real 
presence in the eucharist: evidently independent spir- 
its like Hoen who anticipated the doctrine later taken 
up by Carlstadt and Zwingli. 

The validity of the Edict of Worms was afiirmed 
for the Burgundian provinces. The edict was read 
publicly at Antwerp while four hundred of Luther's ^"21 ' 
books were burnt, three hundred confiscated from 
the shops and one hundred brought by the people. 



242 



THE NETHEKLANDS 



1522 



The Inqui- 
sition 



April 23, 
1522 
June 1, 
1523 



Martyrs, 
July 1, 
1523 



1524 



1525 



July 31 



Whereas spiritual officers were at first employed, civil 
magistrates now began to act against the innovators. 
In the beginning, attention was paid to municipal priv- 
ileges, but these soon came to be disregarded, and re- 
sistance on any pretext was treated as rebellion and 
treason. The first persons to be arrested were the 
Prior of Antwerp, Probst, who recanted, but later es- 
caped and relapsed, and two other intimate friends of 
Erasmus. 

Charles wished to introduce the Spanish inquisition, 
but his councillors were all against it. Under a dif- 
ferent name, however, it was exactly imitated when 
Francis van der Hulst was appointed chief inquisitor 
by the state, and was confirmed by a bull of Adrian VI. 
The original inquisitorial powers of the bishops re- 
mained, and a supreme tribunal of three judges was 
appointed in 1524. 

The first martyrs, Henry Voes and John Esch of 
Brussels, said Erasmus, made many Lutherans by 
their death. Luther wrote a hymn on the subject and 
published an open letter to the Christians of the Neth- 
erlands. Censorship of the press was established in 
Holland in vain, for everything goes to show that Lu- 
theranism rapidly increased. Popular interest in the 
subject seemed to be great. Every allusion to ec- 
clesiastical corruption in speeches or in plays was ap- 
plauded. Thirty-eight laborers were arrested at Ant- 
werp for assembling to read and discuss the gospel. 
Iconoclastic outbreaks occurred in which crucifixes 
were desecrated. In the same year an Italian in Ant- 
werp wrote that though few people were openly Lu- 
theran many were secretly so, and that he had been 
assured by leading citizens that if the revolting peas- 
ants of Germany approached Antwerp, twenty thou- 
sand armed men would rise in the city to assist 
them. When a Lutheran was drowned in the Scheldt, 



THE LUTHERAN EEFORM 243 

the act precipitated a riot. In 1527 the English am- 
bassador wrote Wolsey from the Netherlands that two 
persons out of three ''kept Luther's opinions," and 
that while the English New Testament was being 
printed in that city, repeated attempts on his part to 
induce the magistrates to interfere came to nothing. 
Protestant works also continued to pour from the 
presses. The Bible was soon translated into Dutch, 
and in the course of eight years four editions of the 
whole Bible and twenty-five editions of the New Testa- 
ment were called for, though the complete Scriptures 
had never been printed in Dutch before. 

Alarmed by the spread of heresy, attributed to too October 14, 
great mildness, the government now issued an edict 
that inaugurated a reign of terror. Death was de- 
creed not only for all heretics but for all who, not being 
theologians, discussed articles of faith, or who cari- 
catured God, Mary, or the saints, and for all who failed 
to denounce heretics kno^^m to them. While the gov- 
ernment momentarily flattered itself that heres}^ had 
been stamped out, at most it had been driven under 
ground. One of the effects of the persecution was to 
isolate the Netherlands from the Empire culturally 
and to some small extent commercially. 

But heresy proved to be a veritable hydra. From Anabaptists 
one head sprang many daughters, the Anabaptists, 
harder to deal with than their mother. For while Lu- 
theranism stood essentially for passive obedience, and 
flourished nowhere save as a state church, Anabaptism 
was frankly revolutionary and often socialistic. Mel- ' 
chior Hoffmann, the most striking of their early lead- 
ers, a fervent and uneducated fanatic, driven from 
place to place, wandered from Sweden and Denmark to ^ 
Italy and Spain preaching chiliastic and communistic 1530-1533 
ideas. Only for three years was he much in the Neth- 
erlands, but it was there that he won his greatest sue- 



244 THE NETHERLANDS 

cesses. Appealing, as the Anabaptists always did, to 
the lower classes, he converted thousands and tens of 
thousands of the very poor — beggars, laborers and 
sailors — who passionately embraced the teaching that 
promised the end of kings and governments and the 
advent of the **rule of the righteous." Mary of Hun- 
gary was not far wrong when she wrote that they 
planned to plunder all churches, nobles, and wealthy 
merchants, in short, all who had property, and from 
the spoil to distribute to every individual according to 

October?, his need. A new and severer edict would have meant 

^^^^ a general massacre, had it been strictly enforced, but 

another element entered into the situation. The city 
bourgeoisies that had previously resisted the govern- 
ment, now supported it in this one particular, persecu- 
tion of the Anabaptists. When at Amsterdam the 

1534 sectaries rose and very nearly mastered the city, death 

by fire was decreed for the men, by water for the 
women. From Antwerp they w^ere banished by a 

June 24, general edict especially aimed at them supplemented 
by massacres in the northern provinces. After the 
crisis at Miinster, though the Anabaptists continued to 
be a bugbear to the ruling classes, their propaganda 
lost its dangerously revolutionary character. Menno 
Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, be- 
came the leader of the movement and succeeded in 
gathering the smitten people into a large and harmless 
body. The Anabaptists furnished, however, more 
martyrs than did any other sect. 

Lutheranism also continued to spread. The edict of 
1540 confesses as much while providing new and 
sterner penalties against those who even interceded 
for heretics. The fact is that the inquisition as di- 
rected against Lutherans was thoroughly unpopular 
and was resisted in various provinces on the technical 
ground of local privileges. The Protestants managed 



1535 



THE LUTHERAN REFOBM 245 

to keep unnoticed amidst a general intention to con- 
nive at them, and though they did not usually flinch 
from martyrdom tliey did not court it. The inquis- 
itors were obliged to arrest their victims at the dead 
of night, raiding their houses and hauling them from 
bed, in order to avoid popular tumult. When Enzinas ^543 
printed his Spanish Bible at Antwerp the printer told 
him that in that city the Scriptures had been published 
in almost every European language, doubtless an ex- 
aggeration but a significant one. Arrested and im- 
prisoned at Brussels for this cause, Enzinas received 
while under duress visits from four hundred citizens of 
that city who were Protestants. To control the book 
trade an oath was exacted of every bookseller not to 1546 
deal in heretical works and the first "Index of prohib- 
ited books," drawn up by the University of Louvain, 
was issued. A censorship of plays was also attempted. 
This was followed by an edict of 1550 requiring of 
everj^ person entering the Netherlands a certificate 
of Catholic belief. As Brabant and Antwerp repudi- 
ated a law that would have ruined their trade, it re- 
mained, in fact, a dead letter. 

Charles's policy of repression had been on the 
whole a failure, due partly to the cosmopolitan culture 
of the Netherlands and their commercial position mak- 
ing them open to the importation of ideas as of mer- 
chandise from all Europe. It was due in part to the 
local jealousies and privileges of the separate prov- 
inces, and in part to the strength of certain nobles and 
cities. The persecution, indeed, had a decidedly class 
character, for the emperor well knew Protestant nobles 
whom he did- not molest, while the poor seldom failed 
to suffer. And yet Charles had accomplished some- 
thing. Even the Protestants were loyal, strange to 
say, to him personally. The number of martyrs in 
his reign has been estimated at barely one thousand, 



246 



THE NETHERLANDS 



Anna 
Bijns, 
1494-1575 



Spain and 
the Neth- 
lands 



Abdication 
of Charles 



October 25, 
1555 



but it must be remembered that for every one put to 
death there were a number punished in other ways. 
And the body of the people was still Catholic, even in 
the North, It is noteworthy that the most popular 
writer of this period, as well as the first to use the 
Dutch tongue with precision and grace, was Anna 
Bijns, a lay nun, violently anti-Lutheran in sentiment. 

§ 2. The CaijVInist Revolt 

When Charles V, weary of the heaviest scepter ever 
wielded by any European monarch from Charlemagne 
to Napoleon, sought rest for his soul in a monk's cell, 
he left his great possessions divided between his 
brother Ferdinand and his son Philip. To the former 
went Austria and the Empire, to the latter the Bur- 
gundian provinces and Spain with its vast dependen- 
cies in the New World. 

The result of this was to make the Netherlands prac- 
tically a satellite of Spain. Hitherto, partly because 
their interests had largely coincided with those of the 
Empire, partly because by balancing Germany against 
Spain they could manage to get their own rights, they 
had found prosperity and had acquired a good deal of 
national power. Indeed, with their wealth, their cen- 
tral position, and growing strength as province after 
province was annexed, and their consciousness that 
their ruler was a native of Flanders, their pride had 
been rather gratified than hurt by the knowledge that 
he possessed far larger dominions. But when Charles, 
weeping copiously and demanding his subjects' par- 
don, descended from the throne supported by the young 
Prince of Orange, and when his son Philip II had re- 
plied to his father in Spanish, even those present had 
an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for 
the worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed 
over from a Burgundian to a Spanish ruler. From 



THE CALVINIST KEVOLT 



247 



1559 



Religious 
issue 



this time forth the interests and sentiments of the two 
countries became more and more sharply divergent, 
and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a con- 
flict became inevitable. The revolt that followed 
within ten years after Philip had permanently aban- 
doned the Netherlands to make his home in Spain was 
first and foremost a nationalist revolt. Contrasted 
with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the 
enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a na- 
tional self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces. 

But though the catastrophe was apparently inevit- 
able from political grounds, it was greatly complicated 
and intensified by the religious issue. Philip was de- 
termined, as he himself said, either to bring the Neth- 
erlands back to the fold of Kome or ''so to waste their 
land that neither the natives could live there nor should ^ 
any thereafter desire the place for habitation." And 
yet the means he took were even for his purpose the 
worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid 
indulgence and savage cruelty. Though he insisted 
that his ministers should take no smallest step without 
his sanction, he could never make up his mind what to 
do, waited too long to make a decision and then, with 
fatal fatuity, made the wrong one. 

At the same time the people were coming under the Calvinism 
spell of a new and to the government more dangerous 
form of Protestantism. Whereas the Lutherans had 
stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for 
revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to 
the independent middle classes and gave them not 
only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also^ 
what the others had lacked — the will and the power 
to resist tyranny by force. Calvin's polity, as worked 
out in Geneva, was a subordination of the state to the 
church. His reforms were thorough and consciously 
social and political. Calvinism in all lands aroused 



248 THE NETHERLANDS 

republican passions and excited rebellion against the 
powers that be. This feature was the more promi- 
1545 nent in the Netherlands in that its first missionaries 

were French exiles who irrigated the receptive soil of 
the Low Countries with doctrines subversive of church 
and state alike. The intercourse with England, partly 
through the emigration from that land under Mary's 
reigii, partly through the coming and going of Flem- 
ings and Walloons, also opened doors to Protestant 
doctrine. 

At first the missionaries came secretly, preaching to 
a few specially invited to some private house or inn. 
People attended these meetings disguised and after 
dark. First mentioned in the edict of 1550, nine years 
later the Calvinists drew up a Confessio Belgica, as a 
sign and an aid to union. Calvin's French writings 
could be read in the southern provinces in the original. 
Though as early as 1560 some nobles had been con- 
verted, the new religion undoubtedly made its strong- 
est appeal, as a contemporary put it, "to those who 
had grown rich by trade and w^ere therefore ready for 
revolution. ' ' It was among the merchants of the great 
cities that it took strongest root and from the middle 
class spread to the laborers ; influenced not only by the 
example of their masters, but sometimes also by the 
policy of Protestant employers to give work only to co- 
religionists. In a short time it had won a very consid- 
erable success, though perhaps not the actual majority 
of the pojDulation. Many of the poor, hitherto Ana- 
baptists, thronged to it in hopes of social betterment. 
Many adventurers with no motive but to stir the waters 
in which they might fish joined the new party. But 
on the whole, as its appeal was primarily moral and 
religious, its constituency was the more substantial, 
progressive, and intelligent part of the community. 

The greatest weakness of the Protestants was their 



THE CALVINIST EEVOLT 249 

division. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist con- 
tinued to compete for the leadership and hated each 
other cordially. The Calvinists themselves were di- 
vided into two parties, the ''Rekkelijken" or "Com- 
promisers" and the '^Preciesen" or ''Stalwarts." 
Moreover there were various other shades of opinion, 
not amounting quite to new churches. The pure Eras- 
mians, under Cassander, advocated tolerance. More 
pronounced was the movement of Dirck Volckertszoon 
Coornheert a merchant of Amsterdam who, in addition ^coo^in^'^' 
to advising his followers to dissimulate their views 
rather than to court martyrdom, rejected the Calvinist 
dogma of predestination and tried to lay the emphasis 
in religion on the spirit of Jesus rather than on either 
dogma or ritual. 

Though the undertow was slowly but surely carrying 
the Low Countries adrift from Spain, for the moment 
their new monarch, then at the age of twenty-eight, 
seemed to have the winds and waves of politics all in 
his favor. He was at peace with France ; he had noth- 
ing to fear from Germany; his marriage with Mary of 
England made that country, always the best trader 
with the Netherlands, an ally. His first steps were to 
relieve Mary of Hungary of her regency and to give - 
it to Emanuel Philibert, to issue a new edict against 
heresy and to give permission to the Jesuits to enter 1556 
the Low Countries. 

The chief difficulties were financial. The increase in 
the yield of the taxes in the reign of Charles had been 
from 1,500,000 guilders ^ to 7,000,000 guilders. Li ad- 
dition to this, immense loans had exhausted the credit 
of the government. The royal domain was mortgaged. 
As the floating debt of the Provinces rose rapidly the 

1 The guilder, also called the "Dutch pound," at this time was worth 
40 cents intrinsically. Money had many times the purchasing power 
that it has in 1920. 



250 



THE NETHEELANDS 



March, 
1556 



1559 



/ 



Anthony 

Perrenot 

Cardinal 

Granvelle, 

1517^6 



government was in need of a grant to keep up the 
army. The only way to meet the situation was to call 
the States General. When they met, they complained 
that they were taxed more heavily than Spain and de- 
manded the removal of the Spanish troopSj a force 
already so unpopular that William of Orange refused 
to take command of it. In presenting their several 
grievances one province only, Holland, mentioned the 
religious question to demand that the powers of the 
inquisitors be curtailed. To obtain funds Philip was 
obliged to promise, against his will, to withdraw the 
soldiers. This was only done, under pressure, on 
January 10, 1561. 

Philip had left the Netherlands professing his inten- 
tion of returning, but hoping and resolving in his heart 
never to do so. His departure made easier the un- 
avoidable breach, but the struggle had already begun. 
Wishing to leave a regent of royal blood Philip ap- 
pointed Margaret of Parma, a natural daughter of 
Charles V. Born in 1522, she had been married at 
the age of fourteen to Alexander de' Medici, a nephew 
of Clement VII; becoming a widow in the following 
year she was in 1538 married to Ottavio Farnese, a 
nephew of Paul III, at that time only fourteen years 
old. Given as her dower the cities of Parma and 
Piacenza, she had become thoroughly Italian in feeling. 

To guide her Philip left, besides the Council of State, 
a special "consulta" or ''kitchen cabinet" of three 
members, the chief of whom was Granvelle. The real 
fatherland of this native of the Free County of Bur- 
gundy was the court. As a passionate servant of the 
crown and a clever and knowing diplomat, he was in 
constant correspondence with Philip, recommending 
measures over the head of Margaret. His acts made 
her intensely unpopular and her attempts to coax and 
cozen public opinion only aroused suspicion. 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 



25i 



William the 

Silent, 

1533-84 



Three members in the Council of State, Granvelle Egmont, 
and two others, were partisans of the cro^vn; three 
other members may be said to represent the people. 
One of them was Lamoral Count of Egmont, the most 
brilliant and popular of the high nobility. Though a 
favorite of Charles V on account of his proved ability 
as a soldier, his frankness and generosity, he was 
neither a sober nor a weighty statesman. The popular 
proverb, '^Eg-mont for action and Orange for coun- 
sel," well characterized the difference between the two 
leading members of the Council of State. William, 
Prince of Orange, lacking the brilliant qualities of 
Egmont, far surpassed him in acumen and in strength 
of character. From his father, William Count of Nas- 
sau-Dillenburg, he inherited important estates in Ger- 
many near the Netherlands, and by the death of a 
cousin he became, at the age of eleven, Prince of 
Orange — a small, independent territory in southern 
France — and Lord of Breda and Gertruidenberg in 
Holland. With an income of 150,000 guilders per an- 
num he was by far the richest man in the Netherlands, 
Egmont coming next with an income of 62,000. Wil- 
liam was well educated. Though he spoke seven 
languages and was an eloquent orator, he was called 
'Hlie Silent" because of the rare discretion that never 
revealed a secret nor spoke an imprudent word. In 
religion he w^as indifferent, being first a Catholic, then 
a Lutheran, then a Calvinist, and always a man of the 
world. His broad tolerance found its best, or only, 
support in the Erasmian tendencies of Coornheert. 
His second wife, Anne of Saxony, having proved un- 
faithful to him, he married, while she was yet alive, 
Charlotte of Bourbon. This act, like the bigamy of 
Philip of Hesse, was approved by Protestant divines. 
Behind them Egmont and Orange had the hearty sup- 
port of the patriotic and well educated native nobility. 



252 



THE NETHERLANDS 



New 
bishoprics 



March 12, 
1559 



February, 
1561 



The rising generation of the aristocracy saw only the 
bad side of the reign of Charles ; they had not shared 
in his earlier victories but had witnessed his failure to 
conquer either France or Protestantism. 

In order to deal more effectively with the religious 
situation Granvelle wished to bring the ecclesiastical 
territorial divisions into harmony with the political. 
Hitherto the Netherlands had been partly under the 
Archbishop of Cologne, partly under the Archbishop of 
Rheims. But as these were both foreigners Granvelle 
applied for and secured a bull creating fourteen new 
bishoprics and three archbishoprics, Cambrai, Utrecht, 
and Malines, of which the last held the primacy. His 
object was doubtless in large part to facilitate the ex- 
tirpation of heresy, but it was also significant as one 
more instance of the nationalization of the church, a 
tendency so strong that neither Catholic nor Protes- 
tant countries escaped from it. In this case all the 
appointments were to be made by the king with con- 
sent of the pope. The people resented the autocratic 
features of a plan they might otherwise have ap- 
proved ; a cry was raised throughout the provinces that 
their freedom was infringed upon, and that the plan 
furnished a new instrument to the hated inquisition. 

Granvelle, more than ever detested when he received 
the cardinal's hat, was dubbed *'the red devil," ''the 
archrascal," ''the red dragon," "the Spanish swine," 
"the pope's dung." In July Egmont and Orange sent 
their resignations from the Council of State to Philip, 
saying that they could no longer share the responsibil- 
ity for Granvelle 's policy, especially as everything was 
done behind their backs. Philip, however, was slow 
to take alarm. For the moment his attention was 
taken up with the growth of the Huguenot party in 
France and his efforts centered on helping the French 
Catholics against them. But the Netherlands were im- 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 253 

portunate. In voicing the wishes of the people the 
province of Brabant, with the capital, Brussels, the 
metropolitan see, Malines, and the university, Louvain, 
took as decided a lead as the Parlement of Paris did 
in France. The estates of Brabant demanded that 
Orange be made their governor. The nobles began to 
remember that they were legally a part of the Empire. 
The marriage of Orange, on August 26, 1561, with the ^ 

Lutheran Anne of Saxony, was but one sign of the rap- iM^ 
prochement. Though the prince continued to profess 
Catholicism, he entertained many Lutherans and em- 
phasized as far as possible his position as vassal of 
the Empire. Philip, indeed, believed that the whole 
trouble came from the wounded vanity of a few nobles. 

But Granvolle saw deeper. When the Estates of jggj 
Brabant stopped the payment of the principal tax or 
''Bede," ^ and when the people of Brussels took as a 
party uniform a costume derived from the carnival, a 
black cloak covered with red fool's heads, the cardinal, 
whose red hat was caricatured thereby, stated that 
nothing less than a republic was aimed at. This was 
true, though in the anticipation of the nobles, at least, 
the republic should have a decidedly aristocratic char- 
acter. But Granvclle had no policy to propose but 
repression. In order to prevent condemned heretics 
from preaching and singing on the scaifold a gag 
was put into their mouths. How futile a measure! 
The Calvinists no longer disguised, but armed — a new 
and significant fact — thronged to their conventicles. 
Emigration continued on a large scale. By 1556 it 
was estimated that thirty thousand Protestants from 
the Low Countries were settled in or near London. 
Elizabeth encouraged them to come, assigning them 

1 The word, meaning "prayer," indicated, like tlie Eufjlish "benevo- 
lence" and the French "don gratuit," that the tax had once been volun- 
tarily granted. 



254 



THE NETHERLANDS 



1563 



Revolt 



h^ 



The Intel- 
lectuals 



Norwich as a place of refuge. She also began to tax 
imports from the Netherlands, a blow to which Philip 
replied by forbidding all English imports. 

Hitherto the resistance to the government had been 
mostly passive and constitutional. But from 1565 
may be dated the beginning of the revolt that did not 
cease until it had freed the northern provinces forever 
from Spanish tyranny. The rise of the Dutch Re- 
public is one of the most inspiring pages in history. 
Superficially it has many points of resemblance with 
the American War of Independence. In both there 
was the absentee king, the national hero, the local 
jealousies of the several provinces, the economic griev- 
ances, the rising national feeling and even the religious 
issue, though this had become very small in America. 
But the difference was in the ferocity of the tyranny 
and the intensity of the struggle. The two pictures 
are like the same landscape as it might be painted by 
Millet and by Turner: the one is decent and familiar, 
the other lurid and ghastly. With true Anglo-Saxon 
moderation the American war was fought like a game 
or an election, with humanity and attention to rules; 
but in Holland and Belgium was enacted the most ter- 
rible f rightfulness in the world; over the whole land, 
mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession 
and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded 
the sultry miasma of human blood and tears. On the 
one side flashed the savage sword of Alva and the piti- 
less flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were 
arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to 
win that freedom which alone can give scope and nobil- 
ity to life. 

And in the melee those suffered most who would fain 
have been bystanders, the humanists. Persecuted by 
both sides, the intellectuals, who had once deserted the 
Reform now turned again to it as the lesser of the two 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 255 

evils. Tliey would have been glad to make terms with 
any church that would have left them in liberty, but 
they found the whips of Calvin lighter than the scor- 
pions of Philip. Even those who, like Van Helmont, 
wished to defend the church and to reconcile the Tri- 
dentine decrees with philosophy, found that their la- 
bors brought them under suspicion and that what the 
church demanded was not harmony of thought but 
abnegation of it. 

The first act of the revolt may be said to be a secret 
compact, kno's\Ti as the Compromise, originally en- The Com- 

promise 

tered into by twenty nobles at Brussels and soon 1555 
joined by three hundred other nobles elsewhere. The 
document signed by them denounced the Edicts as sur- 
passing the greatest recorded barbarity of tyrants and 
as threatening the complete ruin of the country. To 
resist them the signers promised each other mutual 
support. In this as in subsequent developments the 
Calvinist minority took the lead, but was supported by 
strong Catholic forces. Among the latter was the 
Prince of Orange, not yet a Protestant. His conver- 
sion really made little diif erence in his program ; both 
before and after it he wanted tolerance or reconcili- 
ation on Cassander's plan of compromise. He would 
have greatly liked to have seen the Peace of Augsburg, 
now the public law of the Empire, extended to the Low 
Countries, but this was made difficult even to advocate 
because the Peace of Augsburg provided liberty only 
for the Lutheran confession, whereas the majority of / 
Protestants in the Netherlands were now Calvinists. 
For the same reason little help could be expected from 
the German princes, for the mutual animosity that was 
tlie curse of the Protestant churches prevented their 
making common cause against the same enemy. 

As the Huguenots — for so they began to be called 
in Brabant as well as in France — were as yet too few 



256 THE NETHERLANDS 

to rebel, the only course open was to appeal to the gov- 
ernment once more. A petition to make the Edicts 
milder was presented to Margaret in 1566. One of her 
advisers bade her not to be afraid of ''those beggars." 
Originating in the scorn of enemies, like so many party 
names, the epithet ''Beggars" (Gueux) presently be- 
came the designation, and a proud one, of the nobles 
who had signed the Compromise, and later of all the 
rebels. 

Encouraged by the regent's apparent lack of power 
to coerce them, the Calvinist preachers became daily 
bolder. Once again their religion showed its remark- 
able powers of organization. Lacking nothing in 
funds, derived from a constituency of wealthy mer- 
chants, the preachers of the Reformation were soon 
able to forge a machinery of propaganda and party 
action that stood them in good stead against the 
greater numbers of their enemies. Especially in crit- 
ical times, discipline, unity, and enthusiasm make head- 
way against the deadly hatred of enemies and the 
deadlier apathy and timidity of the mass of mankind. 
It is true that the methods of the preachers often 
aroused opposition. 
Iconoclasm The zeal of the Calvinists, inflamed by oppression 
and encouraged by the weakness of the government, 
burst into an iconoclastic riot, first among the»unem- 
/ August 11, ployed at Armentieres, but spreading rapidly to 
Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and then to the northern 
provinces, Holland and Zeeland. The English agent 
at Brussels wrote: "Coming into Oure Lady Church, 
yt looked like hell wher were above 1000 torches bran- 
nyng and syche a noise as yf heven and erth had gone 
together with fallyng of images and fallyng down of 
costly works." Books and manuscripts as well as 
pictures were destroyed. The cry "Long live the 
Beggars" resounded from one end of the land to the 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 257 

other. But withal there was no pillage and no rob- 
bery. The gold in the churches was left untouched. 
Margaret feared a jacquerie but, lacking troops, had to 
look on with folded hands at least for the moment. 
By chance there arrived just at this time an answer 
from Philip to the earlier petition of the Beggars. 
The king promised to abolish the Spanish inquisition 
and to soften the edicts. Freedom of conscience was 
tacitly granted, but the government made an exception, 
as soon as it dared, of those who had committed sac- 
rilege in the recent riots. These men were outlawed. 

No longer fearing a religious war the Calvinists Civil war 
started it themselves. Louis of Nassau, a brother of 
Prince William, hired German mercenaries and in- 
vaded Flanders, where he won some slight successes. 
In Amsterdam the great Beggar Brederode entered 
into negotiations with Huguenots and English friends. 
The first battle between the Beggars and the govern- March 13, 
ment troops, near Antwerp, ended in a rout for the ^^^'^ 
former. 

Philip now ordered ten thousand Spanish veterans, 
led by Alva, to march from Italy to the Netherlands. 
■Making their way through the Free County of Bur- 
gundy and Lorraine they entered Brussels on August ^503 o, 
9, 1567. Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, 
had won experience and reputation as a soldier in the 
German wars. Though self-controlled and courtly in 
manner, his passionate patriotism and bigotry made 
liim a fit instrument to execute Philip's orders to make 
the Netherlands Spanish and Catholic. He began with 
no uncertain hand, building forts at Antwerp and 
quartering his troops at Brussels where their foreign 
manners and Roman piety gave offence to the citizens. 
On September 9 he arrested the counts of Egmont and 
Horn, next to Orange the chief leaders of the patriotic 
party. Setting up a tribunal, called the Council of 



258 THE NETHERLANDS 

Troubles, to deal with cases of rebellion and heresy, he 
inaugurated a reign of terror. He himself spent seven 
hours a day in this court trying cases and signing 
death-warrants. Not only heretics were punished but 
also agitators and those who had advocated tolerance. 
Sincere Catholics, indeed, noted that the crime of 
heresy was generally the mere pretext for dealing with 
patriots and all those obnoxious to the government. 
Executions Por the tirst time we have definite statistics of the 
numbers executed. For instance, on January 4, 1568, 
48 persons were sentenced to death, on February 20, 
37 ; on February 21, 71 ; on March 20, 55 ; and so on for 
day after day, week in and week out. On March 3 at 
the same hour throughout the whole land 1500 men 
were executed. The total number put to death during 
the six years of Alva's administration has been vari- 
ously estimated at from 6,000 to 18,000. The lower 
number is probably nearer the truth, though not high 
enough. Emigration on a hitherto unknown scale 
within the next thirty or forty years carried 400,000 
persons from the Netherlands. Thousands of others 
fled to the woods and became freebooters. The people 
as a whole were prostrated with terror. The prosper- 
ity of the land was ruined by the wholesale confisca- 
tions of goods. Alva boasted that by such means he 
had added to the revenues of his territories 500,000 
ducats per annum. 

William of Orange retired to his estates at Dillen- 
burg not to yield to the tyrant but to find a point 
d'appui from which to fight. Wishing to avoid any- 
thing that might cause division among the people he 
kept the religious issue in the background and com- 
plained only of foreign tyranny. He tried to enlist 
the sjTupathies of the Emperor Maximilian II and to 
collect money and men. William's friend Villiers in- 
vaded the Burgundian State near Maastricht and Louis 



THE CALVINIST EEVOLT 259 

of Nassau inarched with troops into Friesland. By April, 1568 
this time Alva had increased his army by 10,000 Ger- 
man cavalry and both the rebel leaders were severely 
defeated. 

This triumph was followed by an act of power and 
defiance on Alva's part sometimes compared to the 
execution of Louis XVI by the French Republicans. 
Hitherto the sufferers from his reign of blood had not 
in any case been men of the highest rank. The first 
execution of nobles took place at Brussels on June 1, 
that of the captured Villiers followed on June 2, and 
that of Egmont and Horn on June 5. 

Orange himself now took the field with 25,000 troops, 
a motley aggregate of French, Flemish, and Walloon 
Huguenots and of German mercenaries. But he had 
no genius for war to oppose to the veterans of Alva. 
Continually harassed by the Spaniards he was kept in 
fear for his communications, dared not risk a general 
engagement and was humiliated by seeing his retreat, 
in November, turned into a rout. 

Finding that severity did not pacify the provinces, Ju'yi6, 
Alva issued a proclamation that on the face of it was 
a general amnesty with pardon for all who submitted. 
But he excepted by name several hundred emigrants, 
all the Protestant clergy, all who had helped them, all 
iconoclasts, all who had signed petitions for religious 
liberty, and all who had rebelled. As these exceptions 
included the greater portion of those who stood in 
need of pardon the measure proved illusory as a means 
of reconciliation. Coupled with it were other meas- 
ures, including the prohibition to subjects to attend 
foreign universities, intended to put a check on free 
trade in ideas. 

Alva's difficulties and the miseries of the unhappy Taxation 
land entrusted to his tender mercies were increased by 
want of money. Notwithstanding the privilege of 



260 



THE NETHERLANDS 



March 21, 
1569 



Beggars of 
the Sea 



granting their own taxes the States General were sum- 
moned and forced to accept new imposts of one per 
cent, on all property real and personal, ten per cent, 
on the sale of all movable goods and five per cent, on 
the sale of real estate. These were Spanish taxes, ex- 
orbitant in any case but absolutely ruinous to a com- 
mercial people. A terrible financial panic followed. 
Houses at Antwerp that had rented for 300 gulden 
could now be had for 50 gulden. Imports fell off to 
such an extent that at this port they yielded but 14,000 
gulden per annum instead of 80,000 as formerly. The 
harbor was filled with empty boats; the market 
drugged with goods of all sorts that no one would buy. 
The cause of the patriots looked hopeless. Orange, 
discredited by defeat, had retired to Germany. At one 
time, to avoid the clamors of his troops for pay, he was 
obliged to flee by night from Strassburg. But in this 
dark hour help came from the sea. Louis of Nassau, 
not primarily a statesman like his brother but a pas- 
sionate crusader for Protestantism, had been at La 
Rochelle and had there seen the excellent work done 
by privateers. In emulation of his French brethren 
he granted letters of marque to the sailors of Holland 
and Zeeland. Recruits thronged to the ships. Hugue- 
nots, men from Liege, and the laborers of the Walloon 
provinces thrown out of work by the commercial crisis. 
These men promptly won striking successes in preying 
on Spanish commerce. Their many and rich prizes 
were taken to England or to Emden and sold. Often 
they landed on the coasts and attacked small Catholic 
forces, or murdered priests. On the night of March 
31-April 1, 1572, these Beggars of the Sea seized the 
small town of Brielle on a large island at the mouth of 
the Meuse not far from the Hague. This success was 
immediately followed by the insurrection of Rotterdam 
and Flushing. The war was conducted with combined 



THE CALVINIST EEVOLT 261 

heroism and frightfulness. Receiving no quarter the 
Beggars gave none, and to avenge themselves on the 
unspeakable wrongs committed by Alva they them- 
selves at times massacred the innocent. But their suc- 
cess spread like wildfire. The coast towns ''fell away 
like beads from a rosary when one is gone." Forti- 
fications in all of them were strengthened and, where 
necessary, dykes were opened. Reinforcements also 
came from England. 

By this time the revolt had become a veritable revo- devolution 
lution. It found its battle hymn -in the Wilhelmuslied 
and its Washington in William of Orange. As all the 
towns of Holland save Amsterdam were in his hands, 
in June the provincial Estates met — albeit illegally, 
for there was no one authorized to convene them — as- 
sumed sovereign power and made William their Stat- 
holder. They voted large taxes and forced loans from 
rich citizens, and raised money from the sale of prizes 
taken at sea. All defect in prescriptive and legal 
power was made up by the popularity of the prince, 
deeply loved by all classes, not only on account of his 
affability to all, even the humblest, but still more be- 
cause of confidence in his ability. Never did his ver- 
satility, patience and skill in management shine more 
brightly. Among the troops raised by the patriots 
he kept strict discipline, thus making by contrast more 
lurid the savage jDillage by the Spaniards. He kept 
far from fanatics and swashbucklers of whom there 
were plenty attracted to the revolt. His master idea 
was to keep the Netherlands together and to free them 
from the foreigner. Complete independence of Spain 
was not at first planned, but it soon became inevitable. 

For a moment there was a prospect of help from 
Coligny's policy of prosecuting a war with Spain, but 
these hopes were destroyed by the defeat of the French July 17, 
Huguenots near Mons and by the massacre of Saint ^^^^ 



262 THE NETHERLANDS 

August 24, Bartholomew. Freed from menace in this quarter 
^^^^ and encouraged by his brilliant victory, Alva turned 

north with an army now increased to 40,000 veterans. 
First he took Malines and delivered it to his soldiers 
for '*the most dreadful and inhuman sack of the day" 
as a contemporary wrote. The army then marched to 
Guelders and stormed Zutphen under express orders 
from their general ''not to leave one man alive or one 
building unburnt. ' ' * 'With the help of God, ' ' as Alva 
piously reported, the same punishment was meted 
out to Naarden. Then he marched to the still royalist 
Amsterdam from which base he proceeded to invest 
Haarlem. The siege was a long and hard one for the 
Spaniards, harassed by the winter weather and by 
epidemics. Alva wrote Philip that it was "the bloodi- 
est war known for long years" and begged for rein- 
July 12, forcements. At last famine overcame the brave de- 
fenders of the city and it capitulated. Finding that 
his cruelty had only nerved the people to the most des- 
perate resistance, and wishing to give an example of 
clemency to a city that would surrender rather than 
await storming, Alva contented himself with putting to 
death to the last man 2300 French, English, and Wal- 
loon soldiers of the garrison, and five or six citizens. 
He also demanded a ransom of 100,000 dollars ^ in lieu 
of plunder. Not content with this meager largess the 
Spanish troops mutinied, and only the promise of 
further cities to sack quieted them. The fortunes of 
the patriots were a little raised by the defeat of the 
Spanish fleet in the Zuiderzee by the Beggars on Oc- 
tober 12, 1573. 
Requesens ^OT some time Philip had begun to suspect that 
Alva's methods were not the proper ones to win back 
the affectionate loyalty of his people. Though he hes- 
itated long he finally removed him late in 1573 and 
1 The dollar, or Thaler, is worth 75 cents, intrinBioally. 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 263 

appointed in his stead Don Louis Requesens. Had 
Philip come himself he might have been able to do 
something, for the majority professed personal loyalty 
to him, and in that age, as Shakespeare reminds us, 
divinity still hedged a king. But not having the de- 
cision to act in person Philip picked out a favorite, 
kno"\\ni from his constant attendance on his master as 
''the king's hour-glass," in whom he saw the slavishly 
obedient tool that he thought he wanted. The only 
difference between the new governor and the old was 
that Requesens lacked Alva's ability; he had all the 
other's narrowly Spanish views, his bigotry and abso- 
lutism. 

Once arrived in the provinces committed to his 
charge, he had no choice but to continue the war. But 
on January 27, 1574, Orange conquered Middelburg 
and from that date the Spanish flag ceased to float over 
any portion of the soil of Holland or Zeeland. Li open 
battle at Mook, however, the Spanish veterans again 1574 
achieved success, defeating the patriots under Louis of 
Nassau, who lost his life. The beginning of the year 
saw the investment of Leyden in great force. The 
heroism of the defence has become proverbial. When, 
in September, the dykes were cut to admit the sea, so 
that the vessels of the Beggars were able to sail to the 
relief of the city, the siege was raised. It was the first 
important military victory for the patriots and marks 
the turning-point of the revolt. Henceforth the Neth- 
erlands could not be wholly subdued. 

Requesens summoned the States General and of- 
fered a pardon to all who would submit. But the peo- 
ple saw in this only a sign of weakness. A flood of 
pamphlets calling to arms replied to the advances of 
the government. Among the pamphleteers the ablest 
was Philip van Mamix, a Calvinist who turned his Mamix, 

. 1538-Q8 

powers of satire against Spain and the Catholic 



264 THE NETHERLANDS 

church. William of Orange, now a Protestant, living 
at Delft, inspired the whole movement. Requesens, be- 
lieving that if he were out of the way the revolt would 
collapse, like Alva offered public rewards for his assas- 
sination. That there was really no common ground 
w^as proved at a conference between the two foes, 
broken off without result. In the campaign of 1575 
the Spanish army again achieved great things, taking 
Oudewater, Schoonhoven and other places. But the 
rebels would not give up. 
157?^^' ^^^ situation was changed by the death of Reque- 

sens. Before his successor could be appointed events 
moved rapidly. After taking Zierikzee on June 29, the 
Spanish army turned to Aalst, quartered the soldiers on 
the inhabitants, and forced the loj^al city to pay the full 
costs of their maintenance. If even the Catholics were 
alienated by this, the Protestants went so far as to 
preach that any Spaniard might be murdered without 
sin. In the concerted action against Spain the Estates 
of Brabant now took the leading part; meeting at 
Brussels they intimidated the Council of State and 
raised an army of 3000 men. By this time Holland and 
Zeeland were to all intents and purposes an independ- 
ent state. The Calvinists, strong among the native 
population, were recruited by a vast influx of immi- 
grants from other provinces until theirs became the 
dominant religion. Holland and Zeeland pursued a 
separate military and financial policy. Alone among 
the provinces they were prosperous, for they had com- 
mand of the rich sea-borne commerce. 

The growth of republican theory kept pace with the 
progress of the revolt. Orange was surrounded by 
men holding the free principles of Duplessis-Mornay 
and corresponding with him. Dutchmen now openly 
voiced their belief that princes Avere made for the 
sake of their subjects and not subjects for the sake 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 2G5 

of princes. Even though they denied the equal 
rights of the common people they asserted the sov- 
ereignty of the representative assembly. The Council 
of State, having assumed the authority of the viceroy 
during the interim, was deluged with letters petition- 
ing them to shake off the Spanish yoke entirely. But, 
as the Council still remained loyal to Philip, on Sep- 
tember 4 its members were arrested, a coup d'etat 
planned in the interests of Orange and doubtless with 
his knowledge. It was, of course, tantamount to trea- 
son. The Estates General now seized sovereign pow- 
ers. Still protesting their loyalty to the monarch's 
person and to the Catholic religion, they demanded 
virtual independence and the withdrawal of the Span- 
ish troops. To enforce their demands they collected 
an army and took possession of several forts. But 
the Spanish veterans never once thought of giving 
way. Gathering at Antwerp) where they were besieged 
by the soldiers of the States General, they attacked ^''^^J^^'' 
and scattered the bands sent against them and then 
proceeded to sack Antwerp like a captured to^vn. In 
one dreadful day 7000 of the patriots, in part soldiers, 
in part noncombatants, perished. The wealth of the 
city was looted. The army of occupation boasted as 
of a victory of this deed of blood, kno\\Ti to the Neth- 
erlanders as 'Hhe Spanish fury." 

Naturally, such a blow only welded the provinces 
more firmly together and steeled their temper to an 
even harder resistance. Its immediate result was a ^^ 
treaty, known as the Pacification of Ghent, between the 
provinces represented in the States General on the one 
hand and Holland and Zeeland on the other, for the 
purposes of union and of driving out the foreigner. 
The religious question was left undecided, save that 
the northern provinces agreed to do nothing for the 
present against the Roman church. But, as hereto- 



266 THE NETHERLANDS 

fore, the Calvinists, now inscribing ''Pro fide et pa- 
tria ' ' on their banners, were the more active and patri- 
otic party. 
Don John, ~0n May 1, 1577, the new Governor General, Don 

-| C J 7 '70 J ^ ' 

John of Austria, entered Brussels. A natural son of 
Charles V, at the age of twenty-four he had made him- 
self famous by the naval victory of Lepanto, and his 
name still more celebrated in popular legend on ac- 
count of his innumerable amours. That he had some 
charm of manner must be assumed; that he had abil- 
ity in certain directions cannot be denied ; but his aris- 
tocratic hauteur, his contempt for a nation of mer- 
chants and his disgust at dealing with them, made him 
the worst possible person for the position of Governor. 
Philip's detailed instructions left nothing to the im- 
agination : the gist of them was to assure the Catholic 
religion and obedience of his subjects *'as far as pos- 
sible," to speak French, and not to take his mistresses 
from the most influential families, nor to alienate them 
in any other way. After force had been tried and 
failed the effect of gentleness was to be essayed. Don 
John was to be a dove of peace and an angel of love. 
But even if a far abler man had been sent to heal 
the troubles in the Netherlands, the breach was now 
past mending. In the States General, as in the nation 
at large, there were still two parties, one for Orange 
and one for Philip, but both were determined to get 
rid of the devilish incubus of the Spanish army. The 
division of the two parties was to some extent sec- 
tional, but still more that class division that seems in- 
evitable between conservatives and liberals. The king 
still had for him the clergy, the majority of the nobles 
and higher bourgeoisie ; with William were ranged the 
Calvinists, the middle and lower classes and most of 
the ''intellectuals," la^^yers, men of learning and those 
publicists known as the "monarchomachs." Many of 



May 12 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 267 

these were still Catholics who wished to distinguish 
sharply between th^e religious and the national issue. 
At the very moment of Don John's arrival the Estates 
passed a resolution to uphold the Catholic faith. 

Even before he had entered his capital Don John February, 

1577 

issued the ''Perpetual Edict" agreeing to withdraw 
the Spanish troops in return for a grant of 600,000 
guilders for their pay. He promised to respect the 
privileges of the provinces and to free political pris- 
oners, including the son of Orange. In April the 
troops really withdrew. The small effect of these 
measures of conciliation became apparent when the 
Estates General voted by a majority of one only to 
recognize Don John as their Statholder. So little in- 
fluence did he have that he felt more like a prisoner 
than a governor; he soon fled from his capital to the 
fortress of Namur whence he wrote urging his king to 
send back the troops at once and let him ''bathe in 
the blood of the traitors." 

William was as much pleased as John was enraged 
at the failure of the policy of reconciliation. While 
the majority of the Estates still hoped for peace Wil- 
liam was determined on independence at all costs. In 
August he sent a demand to the representatives to do 
their duty by the people, for he did not doubt that they 
had the right to depose the tyrant. Never did his 
prospects look brighter. Help was offered by Eliza- 
beth and the tide of republican feeling began to rise 
higher. In proportion as the laborers were drawn to 
the party of revolt did the doctrine of the monarcho- 
machs become liberal. No longer satisfied with the 
democracy of corporations and castes of the Middle 
Ages, the people began to dream of the individualistic 
democracy of modem times. 

The executive power, virtually abandoned by Don 
John, now became centered in a Committee of Eigh- 



2G8 



THE NETHERLANDS 



Archduke 
Matthew 



October 12, 
1576 



teen, nominally on fortifications, but in reality, like the 
French Committee of Public Safety, supreme in all 
matters. This body was first appointed by the citizens 
of Brussels, but the States Greneral were helpless 
against it. It Avas supported by the armed force of 
the patriots and by the personal prestige of Orange. 
His power was growing, for, with the capitulation of 
the Spanish garrison at Utrecht he had been appointed 
Statholder of that province. When he entered Brus- 
sels on September 23, he was received w^ith the wild 
acclamations of the populace. Opposition to him 
seemed impossible. And yet, even at this high-water 
mark of his power, his difficulties were considerable. 
Each province w^as jealous of its rights and, as in the 
American Revolution, each province wished to con- 
tribute as little as possible to the common fund. 
Moreover, the religious question was still extremely 
delicate. Orange 's permission to the Catholics to cele- 
brate their rites on his estates alienated as many Prot- 
estant fanatics as it conciliated those of the old religion. 
The Netherlands were not yet strong enough to do 
without powerful foreign support, nor was public 
opinion yet ripe for the declaration of an independent 
republic. Feeling that a statholder of some sort was 
necessary, the States General petitioned Philip to re- 
move Don John and to appoint a legitimate prince of 
the blood. This petition was perhaps intentionally im- 
possible of fulfilment in a way agreeable to Philip, for 
he had no legitimate brother or son. But a prince of 
the House of Hapsburg offered himself in the person 
of the Archduke Matthew, a son of the Emperor Maxi- 
milian, recently deceased. Though he had neither 
ability of his own nor support from his brother, the 
Emperor Rudolph II, and though but nineteen years 
old, he offered his services to the Netherlands and im- 
mediately went thither. With high statecraft William 



THE CALVINIST EEVOLT 



269 



December 
7, 1577 



drew Matthew into his policy, for he saw that the dan- 
gers to be feared were anarchy and disunion. In some 
cities, notably Ghent, where another Committee of 
Eighteen was appointed on the Brussels model, the 
lowest classes assumed a dictatorship analagous to 
that of the Bolsheviki in Russia. At the same time 
the Patriots' demand that Orange should be made Gov- 
ernor of Brabant was distasteful to the large loyalist 
element in the population. William at once saw the 
use that might be made of Matthew as a figure-head to 
rally those who still reverenced the house of Ilapsburg 
and who saw in monarchy the only guarantee of order 
at home and consideration abroad. Promptly arrest- 
ing tlie Duke of Aerschot, a powerful noble who tried 
to use Matthew's name to create a separate faction. 
Orange induced the States General first to decree Don 
John an enemy of the country and then to offer the gov- 
ernorship of the Netherlands to the archduke, at the 
same time begging him, on account of his youth, to 
leave the administration in the hands of William. 
After Matthew's entry into Brussels the States Gen- j^""^!^ 
eral swore allegiance to this puppet in the hands of 
their greatest statesman. 

Almost immediately the war broke out again. Both 
sides had been busy raising troops. At Genibloux Don 
John with 20,000 men defeated about the same number 
of Patriot troops. But this failed to clarify a situa- 
tion that tended to become ever more complicated. 
Help from England and France came in tiny dribblets 
just sufficient to keep Philip's energies occupied in the 
cruel civil war. But the vacancy, so to speak, on the 
ducal throne of the Burgundian state, seemed to invite 
the candidacy of neighboring princes and a chance of 
seriously interesting France came when the ambition 
of Francis, Duke of Anjou, was stirred to become ruler 
of the Low Countries. William attempted also to make 



January 31 



270 



THE NETHERLANDS 



Protestant 
schism 



July, 1578 



Division of 
the Nether- 
lands 



use of him. In return for the promise to raise 12,000 
troops, Anjou received from the States General the 
title of ''Defender of the Freedom of the Netherlands 
against the tyranny of the Spaniards and their allies." 
The result was that the Catholic population was di- 
vided in its support between Matthew and Anjou, and 
that Orange retained the balance of influence. 

The insuperable difficulty in the way of success for 
the policy of this great man was still the religious one. 
Calvinism had been largely drawn off to Holland and 
Zeeland, and Catholicism remained the religion of the 
great majority of the population in the other prov- 
inces. At first sight the latter appeared far from 
being an intractable force. In contrast with the fiery 
zeal of the Calvinists on the one hand and of the Spani- 
ards on the other, the faith of the Catholic Flemings 
and Walloons seemed lukewarm, an old custom rather 
than a living conviction. Most were shocked by the 
fanaticism of the Spaniards, who thus proved the worst 
enemies of their faith, and yet, within the Netherlands, 
they were very unwilling to see the old religion perish. 
When the lower classes at Ghent assumed the leader- 
ship they rather forced than converted that city to the 
Calvinist confession. Their acts were taken as a 
breach of the Pacification of Ghent and threatened the 
whole policy of Orange by creating fresh discord. To 
obviate this, William proposed to the States General a 
religious peace on the basis of the status quo with re- 
fusal to allow further proselyting. But this measure, 
acceptable to the Catholics, was deeply resented by the 
Calvinists. It was said that one who changed his re- 
ligion as often as his coat must prefer human to divine 
things and that he who would tolerate Romanists must 
himself be an atheist. 

It was, therefore, a primarily religious issue, and 
no difference of race, language or material interest, 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 271 

that divided the Netherlands into two halves. For a 
time the common hatred of all the people for the for- 
eigner welded them into a united whole ; but no sooner 
was the pressure of the Spanish yoke even slightly re- 
laxed than the mutual antipathy of Calvinist and Cath- 
olic showed itself. If we look closely into the causes 
why the North should become predominantly Protes- 
tant while the South gradually reverted to an entirely 
Catholic faith, we must see that the reasons were in 
part racial, in part geographical and in part social. * 
Geographically and linguistically the Northern prov- 
inces looked for their culture to Germany, and the 
Southern provinces to France. Moreover the easy de- 
fensibility of Holland and Zeeland, behind their moats, 
made them the natural refuge of a hunted sect and, this 
tendency once having asserted itself, the polarization 
of the Netherlands naturally followed, Protestants be- 
ing dra\\ni and driven to their friends in the North and 
Catholics similarly finding it necessary or advisable to 
settle in the South. Moreover in the Southern prov- 
inces the two privileged classes, clergy and nobility, 
were relatively stronger than in the almost entirely 
bourgeois and commercial North. And the influence 
of both was thrown into the scale of the Eoman church, 
the first promptly and as a matter of course, the second 
eventually as a reaction from the strongly democratic 
tendency of Calvinism. In some of the Southern cities 
there ensued at this time a desperate struggle between 
the Protestant democracy and the Catholic aristocracy. 
The few Protestants of gentle birth in the Walloon 
provinces felt ill at ease in company with their Dutch 
co-religionists and were called by them * ' Malcontents ' ' 
because they looked askance at the political principles 
of the North. 

The separatist tendencies on both sides crystallized January, 
as some of the Southern provinces signed a league at 



272 THE NETHERLANDS 

Arras on January 5 for the protection of the Catholic 
religion. On the 29th this was answered by the Union 
of Utrecht, signed by the representatives of Holland, 
Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Guelders, Zutphen, and the 
city of Ghent, binding the said provinces to resist all 
foreign tyranny. Complete freedom of worship was 
granted, a matter of importance as the Catholic mi- 
nority was, and has always remained, large. By this 
act a new state was born. Orange still continued to 
labor for union with the Southern provinces, but he 
failed. A bitter religious war broke out in the cities 
of the South. At Ghent the churches were plundered 
1581 anew. At Brussels and Antwerp the Protestant pro- 

letariat won a temporary ascendancy and Catholic 
worship was forbidden in both cities. A general emi- 
gration from them ensued. Under the stress of the 
religious war which was also a class war, the last ves- 
tiges of union perished. The States General ceased 
to have power to raise taxes or enforce decrees, and 
presently it was no more regarded. 

Even William of Orange now abandoned his show 
of respect for the monarch and became wholly the 

1580 champion of liberty and of the people. The States 
General recognized Anjou as their prince, but at the 
same time drew up a very republican constitution. 
The representatives of the people were given not only 
the legislative but also the executive powers, includ- 
ing the direction of foreign affairs. The States of the 
Northern Provinces formally deposed Philip, who 

^r^S?^!l^°" could do nothing in reply. A proclamation had al- 

01 rhinp, . . 

1581 ready been issued offering 25,000 dollars and a patent 
of nobility to anyone who would assassinate Orange, 
who was branded as ''a traitor and rascal" and as 
*'the enemy of the human race." 

October 1, j)qjj John, having died unlamented, was succeeded 
by Alexander Farnese, a son of the ex-regent Margaret 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 273 

of Parma. Though an Italian in temperament he Farnese, 

. . . . 1545-92 

united a rare diplomatic pliability with energy as a 
soldier. Moreover, whereas his predecessors had de- 
spised the people they were sent to govern and had 
hated the task of dealing with them, he set his heart 
on making a success. By this time the eyes of all 
Europe were fixed on the struggle in the Low Coun- 
tries and it seemed a worthy achievement to accom- 
plish what so many famous soldiers and statesmen had 
failed in. It is doubtless due to the genius of Farnese 
that the Spanish yoke was again fixed on the neck of 
the southern of the two confederacies into which the 
Burgundian state had spontaneously separated. Wel- 
comed by a large number of the signers of the Treaty 
of Arras, he promptly raised an army of 31,000 men, 1579 
mostly Germans, attacked and took Maastricht. A 
sickening pillage followed in which no less than 1700 
women were slaughtered. Seeing his mistake, on cap- 
turing the next towm, Tournai, he restrained his army 
and allowed even the garrison to march out with the 
honors of war. Not one citizen was executed, though 
an indemnity of 200,000 guilders was demanded. His 
clemency helped his cause more than his success in 
arms. 

Slowly but surely his campaign of conquest pro- Conquest of 
gressed. It was a war of sieges only, without battles. 
Bruges was taken after a long investment, and was 
mildly treated. Ghent surrendered and was also let 1584 
off with an indemnity but without bloody punishment. 
After a hard siege Antwerp capitulated. Practically 1585 
the whole of the Southern confederacy had been re- -" 
duced to obedience to the king of Spain. The Protes- 
tant religion was forbidden by law but in each case 
when a city was conquered the Protestants were given 
from two to four years either to become reconciled or 
to emigrate. 



274 



THE NETHERLANDS 



Freedom of 
the North 



January 17, 
1583 



June, 1584 



July 10, 
1584 



But the land that was reconqnered was not the land 
that had revolted. A ghastly ruin accompanied by a 
numbing blight on thought and energy settled on the 
once happy lands of Flanders and Brabant. The civil 
wars had so wasted the country that wolves prowled 
even at the gates of great cities. The coup de grace 
was given to the commerce of Antwerp by the barring 
of the Scheldt by Holland. Trade with the East and 
West Indies was forbidden by Spain until 1640. 

But the North, after a desperate struggle and much 
suffering, vindicated its freedom. Anjou tried first to 
make himself their tyrant ; his soldiers at Antwerp at- 
tacked the citizens but were beaten off after frightful 
street fighting. The ''French fury" as it was called, 
taught the Dutch once again to distrust foreign gov- 
ernors, though the death of Anjou relieved them of 
fear. 

But a sterner foe was at hand. Having reduced 
what is now called Belgium, Farnese attacked the Ref- 
ormation and the republicans in their last strongholds 
in Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The long war, of a 
high technical interest because of the peculiar military 
problems to be solved, was finally decided in favor of 
the Dutch. The result was due in part to the heroic 
courage of the people, in part to the highly defensible 
nature of their country, saved time and again by that 
great ally, the sea. 

A cruel blow was the assassination of Orange whose 
last words were "God have pity on this poor people." 
His life had been devoted to them in no spirit of am- 
bition or vulgar pride; his energy, his patience, his 
breadth had served the people well. And at his death 
they showed themselves worthy of him and of the 
cause. Around his body the Estates of Holland con- 
vened and resolved to bear themselves manfully with- 



THE CALVINIST REVOLT 275 

out abatement of zeal. Eight nobly did they aquit 
themselves. 

The bad ending of a final attempt to get foreign help 1586 
taught the Dutch Republic once and for all to rely only ^^^^^ ^^ 
on itself. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Eliza- 
beth's favorite, was inaugurated as Governor General. 
His assumption of independent power enraged his 
royal mistress, whereas the Dutch were alienated by 
the suspicion that he sacrificed their interests to those 
of England, and by his military failures. In less than 1587 
two years he was forced to return home. 

Under the statesmanlike guidance of John van Old- Olden- 
enbarneveldt, since 1586 Pensionary of Holland, a Re- i547!i5i9' 
public was set up founded on the supremacy of the 
Estates. Under his exact, prudent, and resolute lead- 
ership internal freedom and external power were alike 
developed. Though the war continued long after 1588 
the defeat of the Armada in that year crippled Spain 
beyond hope of recovery and made the new nation 
practically safe. 

The North had suffered much in the war. The f re- The Dutch 
quent inundation of the land destroyed crops. Am- 
sterdam long held out against the rest of Holland in 
loyalty to the king, but she suffered so much by the 
blockade of the Beggars of the Sea and by the emigra- 
tion of her merchants to nearby cities, that at last she 
gave in and cast her lot with her people. From that 
time she assumed the commercial hegemony once exer- 
cised by Antwerp. Recovering rapidly from the de- 
vastations of war, the Dutch Republic became, in the 
seventeenth century, the first sea-power and first 
money-power in the world. She gave a king to Eng- 
land and put a bridle in the mouth of France. She 
established colonies in America and in the East Indies. 
With her celebrated new university of Leyden, with 



Republic 



276 THE NETHERLANDS 

publicists like Grotius, theologians like Jansen, pain- 
ters like Van Dyke and Eembrandt, philosophers like 
Spinoza, she took the lead in many of the tields of 
thought. Her material and spiritual power, her toler- 
ance and freedom, became the envy of the world. 



CHAPTER VI 
ENGLAND 

§ 1. Henry VIII and the NATioN^yij Chubch. 
1509-i7 

''The heavens lausrh, the earth exults; all is full of Henry VIII, 

1509-47 
milk and honey and nectar." With these words the 

accession of Henry VIII was announced to Erasmus 
by his pupil and the king's tutor, Lord Mount joy. 
This lover of learning thought the new monarch would 
be not only Octavus but Octavius, fostering letters and 
cherishing the learned. There was a general feeling 
that a new era was beginning and a new day dawning 
after the long darkness of the Middle Age with its 
nightmares of Black Deaths and Peasants' Revolts 
and, worst of all, the civil war that had humbled Eng- 
land's power and racked her almost to pieces within. 

It was commonly believed that the young prince was 
a paragon : handsome, athletic, learned, generous, wise, 
and merciful. That he was fond of sports, strong and 
in early life physically attractive, is well attested. The 
principal evidences of his learning are the fulsome tes- . 
timony of Erasmus and his work against Luthei. But 
it has been lately shown that Erasmus was capable of 
passing off, as the work of a powerful patron, composi- 
tions which he knew to be written by Latin secretaries ; 
and the royal author of the Defence of the Seven Sac- 
raments, which evinces but mediocre talent, received 
nmch unacknowledged assistance. 

If judged by his foreign relations Henry's states- 
manship was unsuccessful. His insincerity and per- 
fidy often overreached themselves, and he Avas often 

277 



278 ENGLAND 

deceived. Moreover, he was inconstant, pursuing no 
worthy end whatever. England was by her insular 
location and by the nearly equal division of power on 
the Continent between France and the emperor, in a 
wonderfully safe and advantageous place. But, so far 
was Henry from using this gift of fortune, that he 
seems to have acted only on caprice. 
Domestic In domestic policy Henry achieved his greatest suc- 
^°^^^ cesses, in fact, very remarkable ones indeed. Doubt- 

less here also he was favored by fortune, in that his 
own ends happened in the main to coincide with the 
deeper current of his people's purpose, for he was sup- 
ported by just that wealthy and enterprising bour- 
geois class that was to call itself the people and to 
make public opinion for the next three centuries. In 
time this class would become sufficiently conscious of 
its own power to make Parliament supreme and to de- 
mand a reckoning even from the crown, but at first 
it needed the prestige of the royal name to conquer 
the two privileged classes, the clergy and the nobility. 
The merchants and the moneyed men only too willingly 
became the faithful followers of a chief who lavishly 
tossed to them the wealth of the church and the po- 
litical privileges of the barons. And Henry had just 
one strong quality that enabled him to take full ad- 
vantage of this position ; he seemed to lead rather than 
to drive, and he never wantonly challenged Parliament. 
The atrocity of his acts was only equaled by their scru- 
pulous legality. 

On Henry's morals there should be less disagree- 
ment than on his mental gifts. Holbein's faithful 
portraits do not belie him. The broad-shouldered, 
heavy-jowled man, standing so firmly on his widely 
parted feet, has a certain strength of will, or rather 
of boundless egotism. Francis and Charles showed 
themselves persecuting, and were capable of having a 



HENRY VIII 



279 



defaulting minister or a rebel put to death ; but neither 
Charles nor Francis, nor any other king in modern 
times, has to answer for the lives of so many nobles 
and ministers, cardinals and queens, whose heads, as 
Thomas More put it, he kicked around like footballs. 

The reign began, as it ended, with political murder. 
The miserly PTenry VII had made use of two tools, 
Empson and Dudley, who, by minute inquisition into 
technical offences and by nice adjustment of fines to 
the wealth of the offender, had made the law unpopular 
and the king rich. Four days after his succession, 
Henry VIII issued a proclamation asking all those who 
had sustained injury or loss of goods by these commis- 
sioners, to make supplication to the king. The flood- 
gates of pent-up wrath were opened, and the two un- 
happy ministers swept away by an act of attainder. 

The pacific policy of the first years of the reign did 
not last long. The young king felt the need of mar- 
tial glory, of emulating the fifth Henry, of making 
himself talked about and enrolling his name on the 
list of conquerors who, in return for plaguing man- 
kind, have been deified by them. It is useless to look 
for any statesmanlike purpose in the war provoked 
with France and Scotland, but in the purpose for which 
he set out Henry was brilliantly successful : the French 
were so quickly routed near Guinegate that the action 
has been known in history as the Battle of the Spurs. 
While the king was still absent in France and his queen 
regent in England, his lieutenants inflicted a decisive 
defeat on the Scots and slew their king, James IV, at 
Flodden. England won nothing save military glory 
by these campaigns, for the invasion of France was 
at once abandoned and that of Scotland not even un- 
dertaken. 

The gratification of the national vanity redounded 
to the profit not only of Henry but of his minister, 



Empson 
and Dudley 
executed, 
April 25, 
1509 



War with 
France and 
Scotland 



August 13, 
1513 



September 



Wolsey, 
c. 1475- 
1530 



280 ENGLAND 

Thomas Wolsey. A poor man, like the other tools 
of the Tudor despot, he rose rapidly in church and 
state partly by solid gifts of statesmanship, partly 
by baser arts. By May, 1515, Erasmus described 
him as all-powerful with the king and as bearing the 
main burden of public affairs on his shoulders, and 
fifteen years later Luther spoke of him as ''the demi- 
god of England, or rather of Europe." His position 
at home he owed to his ability to curry favor with the 
king by shouldering the odium of unpopular acts. 
May, 1521 "When the Duke of Buckingham was executed for the 
crime of standing next in succession to the throne, 
Wolsey was blamed; many people thought, as it was 
put in a pun attributed to Charles V, that "it was a 
pity so noble a hucli, should have been slain by such a 
hound." Wolsey lost the support of the nobles by the 
pride that delighted to humble them, and of the com- 
mons by the avarice that accumulated a corrupt for- 
tune. But, though the rich hated him for his law in 
regard to enclosures, and the poor for not having that 
law enforced, he recked little of aught, knowing himself 
secure under the royal shield. 

To make his sovereign abroad as great as at home, he 
took advantage of the nice balance of power existing 
on the Continent. ''Nothing pleases him more than 
to be called the arbiter of Christendom," wrote Gius- 
tiniani, and such, in fact, he very nearly was. His 
diplomatic gifts were displaj^ed with immense show 
during the summer of 1520, when Henry met both 
Francis and Charles V, and promised each secretly 
to support him against his rival. The camp where 
the royalties of France and England met, near Guines, 
amid- scenes of pageantry and chivalry so resplendent 
as to give it the name of The Field of Cloth of Gold, 
saw an alliance cemented by oath, only to be followed 
by a solemn engagement between Henry and Charles, 



HENRY VIII 281 

repugnant in every particular to that with France. 
When war actually broke out between the two, Eng- 
land preferred to throw her weight against France, 
thereby almost helping Charles to the throne of uni- 
versal empire and raising up for herself an enemy to 
menace her safety in many a crisis to come. In the 
end, then, Wolsey's perfidious policy failed; and his 
personal ambition for the papacy was also frustrated. 

But while ''the congress of kings," as Erasmus 
called it, was disporting itself at Guines and Calais, 
the tide of a new movement was swiftly and steadily 
rising, no more obeying them than had the ocean obeyed 
Canute. More in England than in most countries the 
Reformation was an imported product. Its ''dawn 
came up like thunder" from across the North Sea. 

Luther's Theses on Indulgences were sent by Eras- 
mus to his English friends Thomas More and John ,. , ^ 

° . March 5, 

Colet little more than four months after their pro- 1518 
mulgation. By February, 1519, Froben had exported 
to England a number of volumes of Luther's works. 
One of them fell into the hands of Henry VIII or his 
sister Mary, quondam Queen of France, as is shown ' 
by the royal arms stamped on it. Many others were 
sold by a bookseller at Oxford throughout 1520, in 
which year a government official in London w^rote to 
his son in the countr)^, ''there be heretics here which March 3, 
take Luther's opinions." The universities were both 
infected at the same time. At Cambridge, especially, 
a number of young men, many of them later prominent 
reformers, met at the "White Horse Tavern regularly 
to discuss the new ideas. The tavern w^as nicknamed 
"Germany" and the young enthusiasts "Germans'^ 
in consequence. But surprisingly numerous as are the 
evidences of the spread of Lutheranism in these early 
years, naturally it as yet had few prominent adherents. 
When Erasmus wrote Luther that he had well-wishers 



1521 



282 



ENGLAND 



May, 1519 



1520 



May 12, 
1521 



1526 



January 
21, 1521 



in England, and those of the greatest, he was exagger- 
ating or misinformed. At most he may have been 
thinking of John Colet, whose death in September, 
1519, came before he could take any part in the religious 
controversy. 

At an early date the government took its stand 
against the heresy. Luther's books were examined 
by a committee of the University of Cambridge, con- 
demned and burnt by them, and soon afterwards by 
the government. At St. Paul's in London, in the pres- 
ence of many high dignitaries and a crowd of thirty 
thousand spectators Luther's books were burnt and 
his doctrine "reprobated" in addresses by John 
Fisher, Bishop of Eochester, and Cardinal Wolsey. 
A little later it was forbidden to read, import or keep 
such works, and measures were taken to enforce this 
law. Commissions searched for the said pamphlets; 
stationers and merchants were put under bond not 
to trade in them; and the German merchants of the 
Steelyard were examined. When it was discovered 
that these foreigners had stopped "the mass of the 
body of Christ," commonly celebrated by them in All 
Hallows' Church the Great, at London, they were 
haled before Wolsey 's legatine court, forced to ac- 
knowledge its jurisdiction, and dealt with. 

With one accord the leading Englishmen declared 
against Luther. Cuthbert Tunstall, a mathematician 
and diplomatist, and later Bishop of London, wrote 
Wolsey from Worms of the devotion of the Germans 
to their leader, and sent to him The Babylonian Cap- 
tivity with the comment, "there is much strange opin- 
ion in it near to the opinions of Boheme ; I pray God 
keep that book out of England." Wolsey himself, 
biassed perhaps by his ambition for the tiara, labored 
to suppress the heresy. Most important of all, Sir 
Thomas More was promptly and decisively alienated. 



/ 



HENEY VIII 283 

It was More, according to Henry VIIT, who ''by subtle, 
sinister slights unnaturally procured and provoked 
him" to write against the heretic. His Defence of the 
Seven Sacraments, in reply to the Babylonian Cap- 
tivity, though an extremely poor work, was greeted, 
on its appearance, as a masterpiece. The handsome July, 1521 
copy bound in gold, sent to Leo X, was read to the 
pope and declared by him the best antidote to heresy 
yet produced. In recognition of so valuable an arm, 
or of so valiant a champion, the pope granted an in- 
dulgence of ten years and ten periods of forty days 
to the readers of the book, and to its author the long 
coveted title Defender of the Faith. Luther answered 
the king with ridicule and the controversy was con- 
tinued by Henry 's henchmen More, Fisher, and others. 
Stung to the quick, Henry, who had already urged 
the emperor to crush the heretic, now wrote with the 
same purpose to the elector and dukes of Saxony and 
to other German princes. 

But while the chief priests and rulers were not slow pro^^thof 

11 TIT JLuther- 

to reject the new ''gospel," the common people heard anism 
it gladly. The rapid diffusion of Lutheranism is 
proved by many a side light and by the very proclama- 
tions issued from time to time to ' ' resist the damnable 
heresies" or to suppress tainted books. John Hey- 
wood's Tlie Four P's: a merry Interlude of a Palmer, 
a Pardoner, a Potycary and a Pedlar, written about 
1528 though not published until some years later, is 
full of Lutheran doctrine, and so is another book very 
popular at the time, Simon Fish's Supplication of 
Beggars. John Skelton's Colyn Clout, a scathing in- c. 1522 
dictment of the clergy, mentions that 

Some have smacke 
Of Luther's sacke, 
And a brennyng sparke 
Of Luther's warke. 



284 ENGLAND 

William But the acceptance of the Reformation, as apart 

Bible^^^ from mere grumbling at the church, could not come 
until a Protestant literature was built up. In Eng- 
land as elsewhere the most powerful Protestant tract 
was the vernacular Bible. Owing to the disfavor in 
which Wyclif's doctrines were held, no English ver- 
sions had been printed until the Protestant divine Wil- 
liam Tyndale highly resolved to make the holy book 
more familiar to the ploughboy than to the bishop. 

Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale 
imbibed the doctrines first of Erasmus, then of Luther, 
and finally of Zwingli. Applying for help in his pro- 
ject to the bishop of London and finding none, he sailed 

1524 f^^ Germany where he completed a translation of the 

New Testament, and started printing it at Cologne. 
Driven hence by the intervention of Cochlaeus and the 
magistrates, he went to Worms and got another printer 

1526 to finish the job. Of the six thousand copies in the 

first edition many were smuggled to England, where 
Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, tried to buy 
them all up, "thinking," as the chronicler Hall phrased 
it, ''that he had God by the toe when he indeed had 
the devil by the fist." The money went to Tyndale 
and was used to issue further editions, of which no 
less than seven appeared in the next ten years. 
The government's attitude was that 

Having respect to the malignity of this present time, 
with the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions, 
the translation of the New Testament should rather be the 
occasion of continuance or increase of errors among the 
said people than anj'- benefit or commodity towards the 
weal of their souls. 

But the magistrates were unable to quench the fiery 
zeal of Tyndale who continued to translate parts of the 
Old Testament and to print them and other tracts at 
Antwerp and at Cologne, until his martyrdom at Vil- 



HENRY VIII 285 

vorde, near Brussels, on October 6, 1536. In 1913 a 
monument was erected on the place of his death. 

Under the leadership of Tyndale on the one side 
and of More on the other the air became dark with a 
host of controversial tracts. They are half filled with Contro- 
theolog'ical metaphysic, half with the bitterest invec- J^^^^^Jg 
tive. Luther called Henry VIII ''a damnable and rot- __ 
ten worm, a snivelling, drivelling swine of a sophist ' ' ; 
More retorted by complaining of the violent language 
of ''this apostate, this open incestuous lecher, this plain 
limb of the devil and manifest messenger of hell." 
Absurd but natural tactic, with a sure effect on the 
people, which relishes both morals and scandal! To 
prove that faith justifies, the Protestants pointed to 
the debauchery of the friars ; to prove the mass a sacri- 
fice their enemies mocked at ''Friar Martin and Gate 
Callate his nun lusking together in lechery." But 
with all the invective there was much solid argument 
of the kind that appealed to an age of theological poli- 
tics. In England as elsewhere the significance of the 
Reformation was that it was the first issue of supremo 
importance to be argued by means of the press before 
the bar of a public opinion sufficiently enlightened to 
appreciate its importance and sufficiently strong to 
make a choice and to enforce its decision. 

The party of the Reformation in England at first 
consisted of two classes, London tradesmen and cer- • 
tain members of what Bismarck long afterward called 
"the learned proletariat." In 1532 the bishops were 
able to say: 

In the crime of heresy, thanked be God, there hath no 
notable person fallen in our time. Truth it is that cer- 
tain apostate friars and monks, lewd priests, bankrupt 
merchants, vagabonds and lewd, idle fellows of corrupt 
nature have embraced the abominable and erroneous 



286 ENGLAND 

opinions lately sprung in Germany and by them have 
been some seduced in simplicity and ignorance. 

Anti-cler- Biit though both antl-clerical feeling and sympathy 

ical feeling -^yii]^ the ncw doctrines waxed apace, it is probable that 
no change would have taken place for many years had 
it not been for the king's divorce. The importance of 
this episode, born of the most strangely mingled mo- 
tives of conscience, policy, and lust, is not that, as some- 
times said, it proved the English people ready to fol- 
low their government in religious matters as sheep 
follow their shepherd. Its importance is simply that 
it loosed England from its ancient moorings of papal 
supremacy, and thus established one, though only one, 
of the cardinal principles of the Protestant revolt. 
The Eeformation consisted not only in a religious 
change but in an assertion of nationalism, in a class 
revolt, and in certain cultural revolutions. It was 
only the first that the government had any idea of 
sanctioning, but by so doing it enabled the people later 
to take matters into their own hands and add the so- 
cial and cultural elements. Thus the Eeformation in 
England ran a course quite different from that in 
Germany. In the former the cultural revolution came 
first, followed fast by the rising of the lower and the 
triumph of the middle classes. Last of all came the 
successful realization of a national state. But in Eng- 
land nationalism came first; then under Edward the 
economic revolution; and lastly, under the Puritans, 
the transmutation of spiritual values. 
Divorce of The occasion of the breach with Eome was the di- 
Catherine vorce of Henry from Catharine of Aragon, who had 
previously married his brother Arthur when they were 
both fifteen, and had lived with him as his wife for 
five months until his death. As marriage with a broth- 
er's widow was forbidden by Canon Law, a dispensa- 



of Aragon 



HENRY VIII 287 

tion from the pope had been secured, to enable Cath- 
arine to marry Henry. The king's scruples about the 
legality of the act were aroused by the death of all 
the queen's children, save the Princess Mary, in which 
he saw the fulfilment of the curse denounced in Levi- 
ticus XX, 21: ''If a man shall take his brother's wife 
. . . they shall be childless," Just at this time Henry 
fell in love with Anne Boleyn, and this further in- Anne 
creased his dissatisfaction with his present estate. Boleyn 

He therefore applied to the pope for annulment of 
marriage, but the unhappy Clement VII, now in the 
emperor's fist, felt unable to give it to him. He 
writhed and twisted, dallied with the proposals that 
Henry should take a second wife, or that his illegiti- 
mate son the Duke of Richmond should marry his half 
sister Mary ; in short he was ready to grant a dispen- 
sation for anything save for the one horrible crime 
of divorce — as the annulment was then called. His 
difficulties in getting at the rights of the question were 
not made easier by the readiness of both parties to 
commit a little perjury or to forge a little bull to 
further their cause. 

Seeing no help in sight from Rome Henry began to 
collect the opinions of universities and ** strange doc- 
tors." The English, French, and Italian universities 
decided as the king wished that his marriage was null ; 
"Wittenberg and Marburg rendered contrary opinions. 
Many theologians, including Erasmus, Luther, and 
Melanchthon, expressed the opinion that bigamy would 
be the best way to meet the situation. 

But more was needed to make the annulment legal 
than the verdict of universities. Repulsed by Rome 
Henry was forced to make an alliance, though it proved 
but a temporary one, with the Reforming and anti- 
clerical parties in his realm. At Easter, 1529, Lu- 
theran books began to circulate at court, books advo- 



ENGLAND 



November 
4, 1530 



Reforma- 
tion Par- 
liament, 
November 
3, 1529 



eating the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and 
the reduction of the church to a state of primitive 
simplicity. To Chapuis, the imperial ambassador, 
Henry pointedly praised Luther, whom he had lately 
called ' ' a wolf of hell and a limb of Satan, ' ' remarking 
that though he had mixed heresy in his books that was 
not sufficient reason for reproving and rejecting the 
many truths he had brought to light. To punish Wol- 
sey for the failure to secure what was wanted from 
Eome, the pampered minister was arrested for trea- 
son, but died of chagrin before he could be executed. 
''Had I served my God," said he, ''as diligently as I 
have served my king, he would not have given me over 
in my grey hairs." 

In the meantime there had already met that Parlia- 
ment that was to pass, in the seven years of its exist- 
ence, the most momentous and revolutionary laws as 
yet placed upon the statute-books. The elections were 
free, or nearly so ; the franchise varied from a fairly 
democratic one in London to a highly oligarchical one 
in some boroughs. Notwithstanding the popular feel- 
ing that Catharine was an injured woman and that war 
with the Empire might ruin the valuable trade with 
Flanders, the "government," as would now be said, 
that is, the king, received hearty support by the ma- 
jority of members. The only possible explanation for 
this, apart from the king's acknowledged skill as a 
parliamentary leader, is the strength of the anti-clerical 
feeling. The rebellion of the laity against the clergy, 
and of the patriots against the Italian yoke, needed 
but the example of Germany to burst all the dykes and 
barriers of medieval custom. The significance of the 
revolution was that it was a forcible reform of the 
church by the state. The wish of the people was to 
end ecclesiastical abuses without much regard to doc- 
trine ; the wish of the king was to make himself ' ' em- 



HENRY VIII 



289 



Submission 
of the 
clergy, 
December, 
1530 



peror and pope" in his own dominions. While Henry 
studied Wyclif's program, and the people read the 
English Testament, the lessons they derived from these 
sources were at first moral and political, not doctrinal 
or philosophic. 

The first step in the reduction of the church was 
taken when the attorney-general filed in the court of 
King's Bench an information against the whole body 
of the clergy for violating the statutes of Provisors 
and Praemunire by having recognized Wolsey's lega- 
tine authority. Of course there was no justice in this ; 
the king himself had recognized Wolsey's authority 
and anyone who had denied it would have been pun- 
ished. But the suit was sufficient to accomplish the 
government's purposes, which were, first to wring 
money from the clergy and then to force them to de- 
clare the king *^sole protector and supreme head of 
the church and clergy of England." Reluctantly the 
Convocation of Canterbury accepted this demand in 
the form that the king was, ^' their singular protector, 
only and supreme lord and, as far as the law of Christ 
allows, even Supreme Head." Henry further pro- 
posed that the oaths of the clergy to the pope be abol- 
ished and himself made supreme legislator. Convoca- 
tion accepted this demand also in a document known as 
''the submission of the clergy." 

If such was the action of the spiritual estate, it 
was natural that the temporal peers and the Commons 
in parliament should go much further. A petition of 
the Commons, really emanating from the government 
and probably from Thomas Cromwell, complained bit- 
terly of the tyranny of the ordinaries in ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction, of excessive fees and vexations and friv- 
olous charges of heresy made against unlearned lay- 
men. Abuses of like nature were dealt with in stat- ^Iay.i532 
utes limiting the fees exacted by priests and regulating 



May 15, 
1532 



1532 



290 



ENGLAND 



Marriage 
with Anne 
Boleyn 



Cranmer 



pluralities and non-residence. Annates were abol- 
ished with the proviso that the king might negotiate 
with the pope, — the intention of the government being 
thus to bring pressure to bear on the curia. No won- 
der the clergy were thoroughly frightened. Bishop 
Fisher, their bravest champion, protested in the House 
of Lords : * * For God 's sake, see what a realm the king- 
dom of Boheme was, and when the church fell down, 
there fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the 
Commons is nothing but 'Down with the church,' and 
all this meseemeth is for lack of faith only. ' ' 

It had taken Henry several years to prepare the way 
for his chief object, the divorce. His hand was at 
last forced by the knowledge that Anne was pregnant ; 
he married her on January 25, 1533, without waiting 
for final sentence of annulment of marriage with 
Catharine. In so doing he might seem, at first glance, 
to have followed the advice so freely tendered him to 
discharge his conscience by committing bigamy; but 
doubtless he regarded his first marriage as illegal all 
the time and merely waited for the opportunity to get 
a court that would so pronounce it. The vacancy of 
the archbishopric of Canterbury enabled him to ap- 
point to it Thomas Cranmer, the obsequious divine 
who had first suggested his present plan. Cranmer 
was a Lutheran, so far committed to the new faith 
that he had married ; he was intelligent, learned, a won- 
derful master of language, and capable at last of dying 
for his belief. But that he showed himself pliable to 
his master's wishes beyond all bounds of decency is a 
fact made all the more glaring by the firm and honor- 
able conduct of More and Fisher. His worst act was 
possibly on the occasion of his nomination to the prov- 
ince of Canterbury; wishing to be confirmed by the 
pope he concealed his real views and took an oath of 
obedience to the Holy See, having previously signed 



HENRY VIII 



291 



a protest that he considered the oath a mere form and 
not a reality. 

The first use he made of his position was to pro- 
nounce sentence that Henry and Catharine had never 
been legally married, though at the same time assert- 
ing that this did not affect the legitimacy of Mary 
because her parents had believed themselves married. 
Immediately afterwards it was declared that Anne 
was a lawful wife, and she was crowned queen, amid 
the smothered execrations of the populace, on June 1. 
On September 7, the Princess Elizabeth was born. 
Catharine's cause was taken up at Rome; Clement's 
brief forbidding the king to remarry was followed by 
final sentence in Catharine's favor. Her last ^^ears 
were rendered miserable by humiliation and acts of 
petty spite. When she died her late husband, with 
characteristic indecency, celebrated the joyous event by 
giving a ball at which he and Anne appeared dressed 
in yellow. 

The feeling of the people showed itself in this case 
finer and more chivalrous than that prevalent at court. 
The treatment of Catharine was so unpopular that 
Chapuis wrote that the king was much hated by his 
subjects. Resolved to make an example of the mur- 
murers, the government selected Elizabeth Barton, the 
''Holy Maid of Kent." After her hysterical visions 
and a lucky prophecy had won her an audience, she 
fell under the influence of monks and prophesied that 
the king would not survive his marriage with Anne 
one month, and proclaimed that he was no longer king 
in the eyes of God. She and her accomplices were 
arrested, attainted without trial, and executed. She 
may pass as an English Catholic martyr. 

Continuing its course of making the king absolute 
master the Parliament passed an Act in Restraint of 
Appeals, the first constitutional break with Rome. 



1533 



January, 
1536 



March, 
1534 



January, 
1536 



April 1, 
1534 



Act in Re- 
straint of 
Appeals, 
February, 
1533 



1534 



292 ENGLAND 

The theory of the government was set forth in the pre- 
amble : 

Wliereas by divers sundry old authentic histories and 
chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that 
this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been 
accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and 
king , . . unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts 
and degrees of people, divided in terms, and by names of 
spirituality and temporalty, be bounden and ought to 
bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience. . . , 

therefore all jurisdiction of foreign powers was denied. 
January 15, When, after a recess, Parliament met again there 
were forty vacancies to be filled in the Lower House, 
and this time care was taken that the new members 
should be well affected. Scarcely a third of the spir- 
itual lords assembled, though whether their absence 
was commanded, or their presence not required, by the 
king, is uncertain. As, in earlier Parliaments, the 
spiritual peers had outnumbered the temporal, this was 
a matter of importance. Another sign of the seculari- 
zation of the government was the change in the char- 
acter of the chancellors. Wolsey was the last great 
ecclesiastical minister of the reign ; More and Cromwell 
who followed him were lajTnon. 

The severance with Eome was now completed by 
three laws. In the first place the definite abolition of 
' the annates meant that henceforth the election of arch- 
bishops and bishops must be under licence by the king 
and that they must swear allegiance to him before con- 
secration. A second act forbade the payment of Pe- 
ter's pence and all other fees to Rome, and vested in 
the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to grant li- 
cences previously granted by the pope. A third act, 
for the subjection of the clergy, put convocation under 
the royal power and forbade all privileges inconsistent 
with this. The new pope, Paul III, struck back, though 



HENRY VIII 



293 



with hesitation, excommunicating the king, declaring 153&^ 
all his children by Anne Boleyn illegitimate, and ab- 
solving his subjects from their oath of allegiance. 

Two acts entrenched the king in his despotic pre- 1534 
tensions. The Act of Succession, notable as the first succession 
assertion by crown and Parliament of the right to 
legislate in this constitutional matter, vested the in- 
heritance of the crown in the issue of Henry and Anne, 
and made it high treason to question the marriage. 
The Act of Supremacy declared that the king's maj- 
esty "justly and rightfully is and ought to be supreme Act of 
head of the church of England," pointedly omitting "P''^'"^<^y 
the qualification insisted on by Convocation, — '*as far 
as the law of Christ allows." Exactly how far this 
supremacy went w^as at first puzzling. That it ex- 
tended not only to the governance of the temporalities 
of the church, but to issuing injunctions on spiritual 
matters and defining articles of belief was soon made 
apparent ; on the other hand the monarch never claimed . 
in person the power to celebrate mass. 

That the abrogation of the papal authority was 
accepted so easily is proof of the extent to which the 
national feeling of the English church had already 
gone. An oath to recognize the supremacy of the king 
was tendered to both convocations, to the universities, 
to the clergy and to prominent laymen, and was with 
few exceptions readily taken. Doubtless many swal- 
lowed the oath from mere cowardice; others took it 
with mental reservations; and yet that the majority 
comjDlied shows that the substitution of a royal for 
a papal despotism was acceptable to the conscience of 
the countrj^ at large. Many believed that they were 
not departing from the Catholic faith; but that others 
welcomed the act as a step towards the Reformation 
cannot be doubted. How strong was the hold of Lu- 
ther on the country Avill presently be shown, but here 



^94 ENGLAND 

only one instance of the exuberance of the will for 
a purely national religion need be quoted. ' * God hath 
showed himself the God of England, or rather an Eng- 

1537 lish God," wrote Hugh Latimer, a leading Lutheran; 

not only the church but the Deity had become insular ! 

Fisher But there were a few, and among them the greatest, 

, who refused to become accomplices in the break with 
Eoman Christendom. John Fisher, Bishop of Roches- 
ter, a friend of Erasmus and a man of admirable stead- 
fastness, had long been horrified by the tyranny of 
Henry. He had stoutly upheld the rightfulness of 
Catharine's marriage, and now he refused to see in 
the monarch the fit ruler of the church. So strongly 
did he feel on these subjects that he invited Charles 
to invade England and depose the king. This was trea- 
son, though probably the government that sent him to 
the tower was ignorant of the act. When Paul III 

May 20, rewarded Fisher by creating him a cardinal Henry 
furiously declared he would send his head to Eome to 

June 22, g^^. ^|-^g Y\at. The old man of seventy-six was accord- 
ingly beheaded. 

Sir Thomas Tliis exccutiou was followcd by that of Sir Thomas 

^^^^^ , More, the greatest ornament of his countrv. As More 

executed, 70 ^ .- ^ 

July 6 has been remembered almost entirely by his noble 

Utopia and his noble death, it is hard to estimate his 
character soberly. That his genius was polished to the 
highest perfection, that in a hard age he had an alto- 
gether lovely sympathy with the poor, and in a servile 
age the courage of his convictions, would seem enough 
to excuse any faults. But a deep vein of fanaticism 
ran through his whole nature and tinctured all his acts, 
political, ecclesiastical, and private. Not only was his 
language violent in the extreme, but his acts were 
equally merciless when his passions were aroused. 
Appointed chancellor after the fall of Wolsey, he did 
not scruple to hit the man who was down, describing 



HENRY VIII 



295 



him, in a scathing speech in Parliament, as the scabby 
wether separated by the careful shepherd from the 
sound sheep. In his hatred of the new opinions he 
not only sent men to death and torture for holding 
them, but reviled them while doing it. "Heretics as 
they be," he wrote, "the clergy doth denounce them. 
And as they be well worthy, the temporality doth burn 
them. And after the fire of Smithfield, hell doth re- 
ceive them, where the wretches burn for ever.'^ 

As chancellor he saw with growing disapproval the 
course of the tyrant. He opposed the marriage with 
Anne BolejTi. The day after the submission of the 
clergy he resigned the great seal. He could not long 
avoid further offence to his master, and his refusal 
to take the oath of supremacy was the crime for which 
he was condemned. His behaviour during his last days 
and on the scaffold was perfect. He spent his time 
in severe self-discipline; he uttered eloquent words of 
forgiveness of his enemies, messages of love to the 
daughter whom he tenderly loved, and brave jests. 

But while More's passion was one that any man 
might envy, his courage was shared by humbler mar- 
tyrs. In the same year in which he was beheaded 
thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would 
have approved, by the English government. Mute, in- 
glorious Christs, they were led like sheep to the slaugh- 
ter and as lambs dumb before their shearers. They 
had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words 
ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the 
centuries ; but their meek endurance should not go un- 
remembered. 

To take More's place as chief minister Henry ap- 
pointed the most obsequious tool he could find, Thomas 
Cromwell. To good purpose this man had studied 
Machiavelli's Prince as a practical manual of tyranny. 
His most important service to the crown was the 



Anabaptist 

martyrs, 

1536 



Thomas 

Cromwell, 

14857-1540 



monasteries 



296 ENGLAND 

Dissolution ^ext step ill the reduction of the medieval church, the 
dissolution of the monasteries. Like other acts tend- 
ing towards the Eeformation this was, on the whole, 
popular, and had been rehearsed on a small scale on 
several previous occasions in English history. The 
pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dis- 
solve the preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, 
belonging to the Templars; in 1410 the Commons pe- 
titioned for the confiscation of all church property; in 
1414 the alien priories in England fell under the ani- 
madversion of the government; their property was 
handed over to the crown and they escaped only by the 
payment of heavy fines, by incorporation into Eng- 
lish orders, and by partial confiscation of their land. 
The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its 
object and that therefore the church might rightfully 
be relieved of her ill-gotten gains. These were grossly 
exaggerated, a pamphleteer believing that the wealth 
of the church amounted to half the property of the 
realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality 
amounted to only £320,000; that of the monasteries 
to only £140,000. There had been few endowments in 
the fifteenth century; only eight new ones, in fact, in 
the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and 
hospitals now attracted the money that had previously 
gone to the monks. 

Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. 
The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and 
of the manufacture of books. The functions of hos- 
pitality and of charity that they still exercised were 
not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people 
for the ''gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which 
they were commonly and quite rightly charged. Visi- 
tations undertaken not by hostile governments but b}'' 
bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much im- 
morality obtained within the cloister walls. By 1528 



HENRY VIII 297 

they had become so intolerable that a popular pam- 
phleteer, Simon Fish, in his Supplication of Beggars, 
proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely sup- 
pressed. 

A commission was now issued to Thomas Crom- January 21, 

1535 

well, empowering him to hold a general visitation of 
all churches, monasteries, and collegiate bodies. The 
evidence gathered of the shocking disorders obtaining 
in the cloisters of both sexes is on the whole credible 
and well substantiated. Nevertheless these disorders 
furnished rather the pretext than the real reason for 
the dissolutions that followed. Cromwell boasted that 
he would make his king the richest in Christendom, 
and this was the shortest and most popular way to do 
it. 

Accordingly an act was passed for the dissolution 1536 
of all small religious houses with an income of less 
than £200 a year. The rights of the founders were 
safe-guarded, and pensions guaranteed to those in- 
mates who did not find shelter in one of the larger 
establishments. By this act 376 houses were dis- 
solved with an aggregate revenue of £32,000, not count- 
ing plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks 
or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thou- 
sand retainers or servants. The immediate effect was 
a large amount of misery, but the result in the long 
run was good. Perhaps the principal political im- 
portance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the 
church was to make the Reformation profitable and 
therefore popular with an enterprising class. For the 
lion's share of the prey did not go to the lion, but to 
the jackals. From the king's favorites to whom he 
threw the spoils was founded a new aristocracy, a class 
with a strong vested interest in opposing the restora- 
tion of the papal church. To the Protestant citizens of 
London was noAV added a Protestant landed gentry. 



298 



ENGLAND 



Union with 
Wales, 1536 



April 14, 
1536 



Execution 
of Anne 
Boleyn 



May 19, 
1536 



Before the ** Reformation Parliament" had ceased 
to exist, one more act of great importance was passed. 
Wales was a wild country, imperfectly governed by ir- 
regular means. By the first Act of Union in British 
history, Wales was now incorporated with England 
and the anomalies, or distinctions, in its legal and ad- 
ministrative system, wiped out. By severe measures, 
in the course of which 5000 men were sent to the gal- 
lows, the western mountaineers were reduced to order 
during the years 1534-40; and in 1543 their union with 
England was completed. The measure was statesman- 
like and successful; it was undoubtedly aided by the 
loyalty of the Welsh to their own Tudor dynasty. 

When Parliament dissolved after having accom- 
plished, during its seven years, the greatest per- 
manent revolution in the history of England, it had 
snapped the bands with Eome and determined articles 
of religious belief; it had given the king more power 
in the church than the pope ever had, and had exalted 
his prerogative in the state to a pitch never reached 
before or afterwards; it had dissolved the smaller 
monasteries, abridged the liberties of the subject, set- 
tled the succession to the throne, created new treasons 
and heresies; it had handled grave social problems, 
like enclosures and mendicancy ; and had united Wales 
to England. 

And now the woman for whose sake, one is tempted 
to say, the king had done it all — though of course his 
share in the revolution does not represent the real 
forces that accomplished it — the woman he had won 
with ''such a world of charge and hell of pain," was 
to be cast into the outer darkness of the most hideous 
tragedy in history. Anne Boleyn was not a good 
woman. And yet, when she was accused of adultery 
with four men and of incest with her own brother, 



HENEY VIII 



299 



Seymour 



though she was tried by a large panel of peers, con- 
demned, and beheaded, it is impossible to be sure of her 
guilt. 

On the day following Anne's execution or, as some Jane 
say, on May 30, Henry married his third wife, Jane 
Seymour. On October 12, 1537, she bore him a son, 
Edward. Forced by her husband to take part in the 
christening, an exhausting ceremony too much for her 
strength, she sickened and died soon afterwards. 

In the meantime the Lutheran movement was grow- 
ing apace in England. In the last two decades of 
Henry's reign seven of Luther's tracts and some of 
his hymns were translated into English. Five of the 
tracts proved popular enough to be reprinted. One 
of them was The Liberty of a Christian Man, turned 
into English by John Tewkesbury whom, having died 
for his faith. More called ''a stinking martyr." The 
hymns and some of the other tracts were Englished 
by Miles Coverdale. In addition to this there was 
translated an account of Luther's death in 1546, the 
Augsburg Confession and four treatises of Melanch- 
tlion, and one each of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and 
Bullinger, — this last reprinted. Of course these ver- 
sions are not a full measure of Lutheran influence, but 
a mere barometer. The party now numbered powerful 
preachers like Latimer and Eidley; Thomas Cranmer 
the Archbishop of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell, 
since May, 1534, the king's principal secretary. The 
adherence of the last named to the Reforming party 
is i^erhaps the most significant sign of the times. As 
his only object was to be on the winning side, and as 
he had not a bit of real religious interest, it makes it all 
the more impressive that, believing the cat was about 
to jump in the direction of Lutheranism, he should 
have tried to put himself in the line of its trajectory 



Lutheran 
tracts 



300 ENGLAND 

by doing all he could to foster the Reformers at home 
and the Protestant alliance abroad. 

Coverdale, One of the decisive factors in the Reformation again 

1483?-1569 ppoved to be the English Bible, completed, after the 

end of Tyndale's labors by a man of less scholarship 

but equally happy mastery of lang-uage, Miles Cover- 

' ' dale. Of little original genius, he spent his life largely 

in the labor of translating tracts and treatises by the 

TheEng- German Reformers into his native tongue. His first 

F35^*^^^' great work was the completion of the English Bible 
which was published by Christopher Froschauer of 
Zurich in 1535, the title-page stating that it had been 
translated ''out of Douche and Latyn" — the ''Douche" 
being, of course, Luther's German version. For the 
New Testament and for the Old Testament as far as 
the end of Chronicles, Tyndale's version was used; the 
rest v/as by Coverdale. The work was dedicated to the 
king, and, as Cromwell had already been considering 
the advisability of authorizing the English Bible, this 
was not an unwelcome thing. But as the government 
was as yet unprepared to recognize w^ork avowedly 

1537 based on German Protestant versions, they resorted to 

the device of re-issuing the Bible with the name of 
Thomas Matthew as translator, though in fact it con- 

1538-9 sisted entirely of the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. 

October 11, A light rcvisiou of this work was re-issued as the Great 
Bible, and Injunctions were issued by Cromwell or- 
dering a Bible of the largest size to be set up in every 
church, and the people to be encouraged to read it. 
They were also to be taught the Lord's prayer and 
creed in English, spiritual sermons were to be 
preached, and superstitions, such as going on pilgrim- 
ages, burning candles to saints, and kissing and licking 
relics, were to be discouraged. 

At the same time Cromwell diligently sought a rap- 
prochement with the German Protestants. The idea 



1538 



HENRY VIII 



301 



1536 



April 



was an obvious one that, having won the enmity of 
Charles, England should support his dangerous intes- 
tine enemies, the Schmalkaldic princes. In that day 
of theological politics it was natural to try to find 
cement for the alliance in a common confession. Em- 
bassy after embassy made pilgrimages to Wittenberg, 
where the envoys had long discussions with the Re- January, 
formers both about the divorce and about matters of 
faith. They took back with them to England, together 
with a personal letter from Luther to Cromwell, a 
second opinion unfavorable to the divorce and a con- 
fession drawn up in Seventeen Articles. In this, 
though in the main it was, as it was called, '*a repeti- 
tion and exegesis of the Augsburg Confession," con- 
siderable concessions were made to the wishes of the 
English. Mclanchthon was the draughtsman and Lu- 
ther the originator of the articles. 

This symbol now became the basis of the first defini- 
tion of faith drawn up by the government. Some such 
statement was urgently needed, for, amid the bewilder- 
ing acts of the Reformation Parliament, the people 
hardly knew what the king expected them to believe. 
The king therefore presented to Convocation a Book 
of Articles of Faith and Ceremonies, commonly called ^"^^^^ , 
the Ten Articles, drafted by Fox on the basis of the of Articles 
memorandum he had received at Wittenberg, in close 
substantial and frequently in verbal agreement with it. 
By this confession the Bible, the three creeds, and the 
acts of the first four councils were designated as au- 
thoritative ; the three Lutheran sacraments of baptism, 
penance, and the altar were retained; justification by 
faith and good works jointly w^as proclaimed ; the use 
of images was allowed and purgatory disallowed ; the 
real presence in the sacrament was strongly affirmed. 
The significance of the articles, however, is not so much 
in their Lutheran provenance, as in their promulgation 



302 ENGLAND 

by the crown. It was the last step in the enslavement 
of religion. ^ ' This king, ' ' as Luther remarked, ' ' wants 
to be God. He founds articles of faith, which even the 
pope never did." 
ThePii- j^ Qjjiy remained to see what the people would say 

Grace" to the now order. Within a few months after the dis- 
solution of the Reformation Parliament and the pub- 
lication of the Ten Articles, the people in the north 
spread upon the page of history an extremely emphatic 
protest. For this is really what the Pilgrimage of 
Grace was — not a rebellion against king, property, or 
any established institution, but a great demonstration 
against the policy for which Cromwell became the 
scapegoat. In those days of slow communication opin- 
ions travelled on the beaten roads of commerce. As 
late as Mary's reign there is proof that Protestantism 
was confined to the south, east, and midlands, — roughly 
speaking to a circle with London as its center and a 
radius of one hundred miles. In these earlier years, 
Protestant opinion was probably even more confined; 
London was both royalist and anti-Roman Catholic; 
the ports on the south-eastern coast, including Calais, 
at that time an English station in France, and the uni- 
versity towns had strong Lutheran and still stronger 
anti-clerical parties. 

But in the wilds of the north and west it was differ- 
ent. There, hardly any bourgeois class of traders 
existed to adopt *'the religion of merchants" as Prot- 
estantism has been called. Perhaps more important 
was the mere slowness of the diffusion of ideas. The 
good old ways were good enough for men who never 
knew anything else. The people were discontented 
with the high taxes, and the nobles, who in the north 
retained feudal affections if not feudal power, were 
outraged by the ascendency in the royal councils of 
low-born upstarts. Moreover, it seems that the clergy 



HENRY VIII 303 

were stronger in the north even before the inroads 
of the new doctrines. In the suppression of the lesser 
monasteries Yorkshire, the largest county in England, 
had lost the most foundations, 53 in all, and Lincoln- 
shire the next most, 37. Irritation at the suppression 
itself was greatly increased among the clergy by the 
insolence and thoroughness of the visitation, in which 
not only monasteries but parish priests had been ex- 
amined. In resisting the king in the name of the 
church the priests had before them the example of the 
most popular English saint, Thomas Becket. They 
were the real fomenters of the demonstration, and the -^ 
gentlemen, not the people, its leaders. 

Eioting began in Lincolnshire on October 1, 1536, and 
before the end of the month 40,000 men had joined the 
movement. A petition to the king was drawn up de- 
manding that the church holidays be kept as before, 
that the church be relieved of the payment of first- 
fruits and tithes, that the suppressed houses be re- 
stored except those which the king ''kept for his pleas- 
ure only," that taxes be reduced and some unpopular 
ofiBcials banished. 

Henry thundered an answer in his most high and 
mighty style: ''How presumptuous then are ye, the 
rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most 
brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of least ex- 
perience to find fault with your prince in the electing 
of his councillors and prelates!" He at once dis- 
patched an army with orders "to invade their coun- 
tries, to burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and ^^arch, 
children." Eepression of the rising in Lincolnshire 
was followed by the execution of forty-six leaders. 

But the movement had promptly spread to York- 
shire, where men gathered as for a peaceable demon- 
stration, and swore not to enter "this pilgrimage of October, 
grace for the commonwealth, save only for the main- 



304 ENGLAND 

tenance of God's faith and church militant, preserva- 
tion of the king's person, and purifying the nobility of 
all villein's blood and evil counsellors, to the restitu- 
tion of Christ's church and the suppression of here- 
tics' opinions." In Yorkshire it was feared that the 
money extorted from the abbeys was going to Lon- 
don; and that the new treason's acts would operate 
harshly. Cumberland and Westmoreland soon joined 
the rising, their special grievance being the economic 
one of the rise of rents, or rather of the heavy fines 
exacted by landlords on the renewal of leases. An 
army of 35,000 was raised by the insurgents but their 
leader, Eobert Aske, did not wish to fight, though he 
was opposed by only 8,000 royal troops. He preferred 
a parley and demanded, in addition to a free pardon, 
the acceptance of the northern demands, the summons 
of a free Parliament, the restoration of the papal su- 
premacy as touching the cure of souls, and the suppres- 
sion of the books of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, and Me- 
lanchthon. The king invited Aske to a personal inter- 
view, and promised to accede to the demand for a 
Parliament if the petitioners would disperse. An act 
of violence on a part of a few of the northerners was 
held to absolve the government, and Henry, having 
gathered his forces, demanded, and secured, a * ' dread- 
ful execution" of vengeance. 

Though the Pilgrimage of Grace had some effect in 
warning Henry not to dabble in foreign heresies, the 
policy he had most at heart, that of making himself 
absolute in state and church, went on apace. The cul- 
mination of the growth of the royal power is commonly 
Statute of seen in the Statute of Proclamations apparently giv- 
tions^i539 "^S the king's proclamations the same validity as law 
save when they touched the lives, liberty, or property 
of subjects or were repugnant to existing statutes. 
Probably, however, the intent of Parliament was not 



1539 



HENRY VIII 305 

to confer new powers on the crown but to regulate the 
enforcement of already existing prerogatives. As a 
matter of fact no proclamations were issued during 
the last years of Henry's reign that might not have 
been issued before. 

But the reform of the church by the government, in 
morals and usages, not in doctrine, proceeded un- 
checked. The larger monasteries had been falling into 
the king's hands by voluntary surrender ever since 
1536; a new visitation and a new Act for the dissolu- 
tion of the greater monasteries completed the process. 

An iconoclastic war was now begun not, as in other W-'^ro" 

, relics 

countries, by the mob, but by the government. Relics 
like the Blood of Hailes were destroyed, and the Rood 
of Boxley, a crucifix mechanically contrived so that the 
priests made it nod and smile or shake its head and 
frown according to the liberality of its worshipper, 
was taken down and the mechanism exposed in various 
places. At Walsingham in Norfolk was a nodding 
image of the Virgin, a bottle of her milk, still liquid, 
and a knuckle of St. Peter. The shrine, ranking 
though it did with Loretto and Compostella in popular 
veneration, was now destroyed. "With much zest the 
government next attacked the shrine of St. Thomas 
Becket at Canterbury, thus revenging the humiliation 
of another Henry at the hands of the church. The 
martyr was now declared to be a rebel who had fled 
from the realm. 

The definition of doctrine, coupled with negotiations 
with the Schmalkaldic princes, continued briskly. The 
project for an alliance came to nothing, for John Fred- 
eric of Saxony wrote that God would not allow them 
to have connnunication with Heniy. Two embassies 
to England engaged in assiduous, but fruitless, theo- 
logical discussion. Henry himself, with the aid of 
Cuthbert Tunstall, drew up a long statement "against 



1536 



306 



ENGLAND 



Definitions 
of Faith 

1537 
1539 



July 10, 
1539 



January 6, 
1540 



the opinions of the Germans on the sacrament in both 
kinds, private masses, and sacerdotal marriage." The 
reactionary tendency of the English is seen in the In- 
stitution of the Christian Man, published with royal 
authority, and still more in the Act of the Six Articles. 
In the former the four sacraments previously dis- 
carded are again "found." In the latter, transubstan- 
tiation is affirmed, the doctrine of communion in both 
kinds branded as heresy, the marriage of priests de- 
clared void, vows of chastity are made perpetually 
binding, private masses and auricular confessions are 
sanctioned. Denial of transubstantiation was made 
punishable by the stake and forfeiture of goods ; those 
who spoke against the other articles were declared 
guilty of felony on the second offence. This act, offi- 
cially entitled "for abolishing diversity in opinions" 
was really the first act of uniformity. It was carried 
by the influence of the king and the laity against the 
parties represented by Cromwell and Cranmer. It 
ended the plans for a Schmalkaldic alliance. Luther 
thanked God that they were rid of that blasphemer 
who had tried to enter their league but failed. 

By a desperate gamble Cromwell now tried to save 
what was left of his pro-German policy. Duke William 
of Cleves-Jiilich-Berg had adopted an Erasmian com- 
promise between Lutheranism and Komanism, in some 
respects resembling the course pursued by Henry. In 
this direction Cromwell accordingly next turned and 
induced his master to contract a marriage with Anne, 
the duke's sister. As Henry had offered to the Euro- 
pean audience three tragedies in his three former 
marriages, he now, in true Greek style, presented in 
his fourth a farce or "satyric drama." The monarch 
did not like his new wife in the least, and found means 
of ridding himself of her more speedily than was usual 
even with him. Having shared her bed for six months 



HENRY VIII 307 

he divorced her on the ground that the marriage had j^j 28 
not been consummated. The ex-queen continued to 1540 
live as ''the king's good sister" with a pension and 
establishment of her own, but Cromwell vicariously --" 
expiated her failure to please. He was attainted, with- 
out trial, for treason, and speedily executed. 

On the same day Henry married Catharine Howard, Bluebeard's 
a beautiful girl selected by the Catholics to play the ^^^^'^* 
same part for them that Anne Boleyn had played for 
the Lutherans, and who did so more exactly than her 
backers intended. Like her predecessor she was be- 
headed for adultery on February 13, 1542. On July 
12, 1543, Bluebeard concluded his matrimonial adven- 
tures by taking Catharine Parr, a lady who, like Sieyes 
after the Terror, must have congratulated herself on 
her rare ability in surviving. / 

As a Catholic reaction marked the last eight years Catholic 
of Henry's reign, it may perhaps be well to say a few ^^^^ '"" 
words about the state of opinion in England at that 
time. The belief that the whole people took their re- 
ligion with sheepish meekness from their king is too 
simple and too dishonorable to the national character 
to be believed. That they appeared to do this is really 
a proof that parties were nearly divided. Just as in 
modern times great issues are often decided in gen- 
eral elections by narrow majorities, so in the sixteenth 
century public opinion veered now this way, now that, 
in part guided by the government, in part affecting it 
even when the channels by which it did so are not 
obvious. We must not imagine that the people took 
no interest in the course of affairs. On the contrary 
the burning issues of the day were discussed in public 
house and marketplace with the same vivacity with 
which politics are now debated in the New England 
country store. "The Word of God was disputed, 
rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tav- 



308 ENGLAND 

em/' says a contemporary state paper. In private, 
graver men argued with the high spirit reflected in 
More's dialogues. 

Four parties may be plainly discerned. First and 
most numerous were the strict Anglicans, orthodox and 
royalist, comprising the greater part of the crown- 
loving, priest-hating and yet, in intellectual matters, 
conservative common people. Secondly, there were 
the pope's followers, still strong in numbers especially 
among the clergy and in the north. Their leaders 
were among the most high-minded of the nation, but 
were also the first to be smitten by the king's wrath 
which, as his satellites were always repeating in Latin 
proverb, meant death. Such men were More and 
Fisher and the London Carthusians executed in 1535 
for refusing the oath of supremacy. Third, there 
were the Lutherans, an active and intelligent minority 
of city merchants and artisans, led by men of con- 
spicuous talents and generally of high character, like 
Coverdale, Eidley, and Latimer. With these leaders 
were a few opportunists like Cranmer and a few Ma- 
chiavellians like Cromwell. Lastly there was a very 
small contingent of extremists, Zwinglians and Ana- 
baptists, all classed together as blasphemers and as 
social agitators. Their chief notes were the variety 
of their opinions and the unanimity of their persecu- 
tion by all other parties. Some of them were men of 
intelligible social and religious tenets; others fur- 
nished the * lunatic fringe" of the reform movement. 
The proclamation banishing them from England on 
1538 pain of death merely continued the previous practice 

of the government. 

The fall of the Cromwell ministry, if it may be so 
termed by modern analogy, was followed by a govern- 
ment in which Henry acted as his own prime minister. 



measures 



REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI 309 

He had made good his boast that if his shirt knew his 
counsel he would strip it off.^ Two of his great min- 
isters he had cast down for being too Catholic, one 
for being too Protestant. Having procured laws en- 
abling him to burn Romanists as traitors and Luther- 
ans as heretics, he established a regime of pure An- 
glicanism, the only genuine Anglican Catholicism, how- 
ever much it may have been imitated in after centuries, 
that ever existed. 

Measures were at once taken towards suppressing Anti- 
the Protestants and their Bible. One of the first mar- ^11^1^°^ 
tyrs was Robert Barnes, a personal friend of Luther. 
Much stir was created by the burning, some years later, 
of a gentlewoman named Anne Askewe and of three 
men, at Smithfield. The revulsion naturally caused 
by this cruelty prepared the people for the Protestant 
rule of Edward. The Bible was also attacked. The 
translation of 1539 was examined by Convocation in 
1540 and criticized for not agreeing more closely with 
the Latin. In 1543 all marginal notes were obliterated 
and the lower classes forbidden to read the Bible at all. 

Henry's reign ended as it began with war on France 
and Scotland, but with little success. The government 
was put to dire straits to raise money. A forced loan 
of 10 per cent, on property was exacted in 1542 and 
repudiated by law the next year. An income tax ris- 
ing from four pence to two shillings in the pound 
on goods and from eight pence to three shillings on 
revenue from land, was imposed. Crown lands were 
sold or mortgaged. The last and most disastrous ex- 
pedient was the debasement of the coinage, the old 
equivalent of the modern issue of irredeemable paper. 
As a consequence of this prices rose enormously. 

1 The metaphor came from Erasmus, De Lingua, 1525, Opera, iv, 682, 
where the words are attributed to Caecilius Metellus. 



310 



ENGLAND 



Accession 
of Edward 
VI, Janu- 
ary 28, 1547 



Somerset 
Regent 



1547 



Repeal of 
treason and 
heresy laws 



§ 2. The Keformation Under Edward VI. 1547-1553 

The real test of the popularity of Henry's double 
revolution, constitutional and religious, came when 
England was no longer guided by his strong person- 
ality, but was ruled by a child and governed by a weak 
and shifting regency. It is signiiicant that, whereas 
the prerogative of the crown was considerably relaxed, 
though substantially handed on to Edward's stronger 
successors, the Keformation proceeded at accelerated 
pace. 

Henry himself, not so much to insure further change 
as to safeguard that already made, appointed Reform- 
ers as his son's tutors and made the majority of the 
Council of Regency Protestant. The young king's 
maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, 
was chosen by the council as Protector and created 
Duke of Somerset. Mildness was the characteristic 
of his rule. He ignored Henry's treason and heresy 
acts even before they had been repealed. 

The first general election was held with little govern- 
ment interference. Parliament may be assumed to 
have expressed the will of the nation when it repealed 
Henry's treason and heresy laws, the ancient act De 
Eaeretico comhurendo, the Act of the Six Articles, and 
the Statute of Proclamations. 

To ascertain exactly what, at a given time, is the 
''public opinion" of a political group, is one of the 
most difficult tasks of the historian.^ Even nowadays 
it is certain that the will of the majority is frequently 
not reflected either in the acts of the legisature or in 
the newspaper press. It cannot even be said that the 
w^ishes of the majority are always public opinion. In 
expressing the voice of the people there is generally 
some section more vocal, more powerful on account 

iSee A. L. Lowell: Pullio Opinion and Popular Oovernment, 1914. 



REFOEMATION UNDER EDWARD VI 311 

of wealth or intelligence, and more deeply in earnest 
than any other; and this minority, though sometimes 
a relatively small one, imposes its will in the name of 
the people and identifies its voice with the voice of 
God. 

Therefore, when we read the testimony of contem- Protestant 
poraries that the majority of England was still Cath- opinion 
olic by the middle of the sixteenth century, a further 
analysis of popular opinion must be made to account 
for the apparently spontaneous rush of the Reforma- 
tion. Some of these estimates are doubtless exaggera- 
tions, as that of Paget who wrote in 1549 that eleven 
Englishmen out of twelve were Catholics. But con- 
ceding, as we must, that a considerable majority was 
still anti-Protestant, it must be remembered that this 
majority included most of the indifferent and listless 
and almost all those who held their opinions for no 
better reason than they had inherited them and re- 
fused the trouble of thinking about them. Nearly the 
solid north and west, the country districts and the un- 
represented and mute proletariat of the cities, counted 
as Catholic but hardly counted for anything else. The 
commercial class of the to^vns and the intellectual class, 
which, though relatively small, then as now made pub- 
lic opinion as measured by all ordinary tests, was pre- 
dominantly and enthusiastically Protestant. 

If we analyse the expressed wishes of England, we 
shall find a mixture of real religious faith and of 
worldly, and sometimes discreditable, motives. A new 
party always numbers among its constituency not only 
those who love its principles but those who hate its 
opponents. With the Protestants were a host of allies 
varying from those wiio detested Rome to those who 
repudiated all religion. Moreover every successful 
party lias a number of hangers-on for the sake of 
political spoils, and some who follow its fortunes 



312 ENGLAND 

with no purpose save to fish in troubled waters. 
But whatever their constituency or relative numbers, 
the Protestants now carried all before them. In the 
free religious debate that followed the death of Henry, 
the press teemed with satires and pamphlets, mostly 
Protestant. From foreign parts flocked allies, while 
the native stock of literary ammunition was reinforced 
by German and Swiss books. In the reign of Edward 
there were three new translations of Luther's books, 
five of Melanchthon 's, two of Zwingli's, two of Oeco- 
lampadius's, three of Bullinger's and four of Calvin's. 
Many English religious leaders were in correspondence 
with Bullinger, many with Calvin, and some with 
Melanchthon. Among the prominent European Prot- 
estants called to England during this reign were Bucer 
and Fagius of Germany, Peter Martyr and Bernar- 
dino Ochino of Italy, and the Pole John Laski. 

The purification of the churches began promptly. 

1547 Images, roods and stained glass windows were de- 

stroyed, while the buildings were whitewashed on the 
inside, properly to ex{)ress the austerity of the new 
cult. Evidence shows that these acts, countenanced 
by the government, were popular in the towns but not 
in the country districts. 

Book of Next came the preparation of an English liturgy. 

Prayer, The first Book of Commou Prayer was the work of 

1549 Cranmer. Many things in it, including some of the 

most beautiful portions, were translations from the 
Roman Breviary ; but the high and solemn music of its 
language must be credited to the genius of its trans- 
lator. Just as the English Bible popularized the 
Reformation, so the English Prayer Book strength- 
ened and broadened the hold of the Anglican church. 
Doctrinally, it was a compromise between Romanism, 
Lutheranism and Calvinism. Its use was enforced by 
the Act of Uniformity, the first and mildest of the 



1549 



REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI 313 

statutes that bore that name. Though it might be 
celebrated in Greek, Latin or Hebrew as well as in 
English, priests using any other service were pun- 
ished with loss of benefices and imprisonment. 

At this time there must have been an unrecorded 
struggle in the Council of Regency between the two 
religious parties, followed by the victory of the inno- End of 1549 
vators. The pace of the Reformation was at once in- 
creased; between 1550 and 1553 England gave up most 
of what was left of distinctively medieval Catholicism. 
For one thing, the marriage of priests was now legal- 
ized. That public opinion was hardh' prepared for Accelerated 
this as yet is shown by the act itself in which celibacy ^^^^ 
of the clergy is declared to be the better condition, and 
marriage only allowed to prevent vice. The people 
still regarded priests' wives much as concubines and 
the government spoke of clergymen as '^sotted with 
their wives and children." There is one other bit of 
evidence, of a most singular character, showing that 
this and subsequent Acts of Uniformity were not thor- 
oughly enforced. The test of orthodoxy came to be 
taking the communion occasionall}^ according to the 
Anglican rite. This was at first expected of every- 
one and then demanded by law ; but the law was evaded 
by permitting a conscientious objector to hire a sub- 
stitute to take communion for him. 

In 1552 the Prayer Book was revised in a Protestant 
sense. Bucer had sometliing to do with this revision, 
and so did John Knox. Little was now left of the 
mass, nothing of private confession or anointing the 
sick. Further steps were the reform of the Canon Law 
and the publication of the Forty-two Articles of Re- 
ligion. These were drawn up by Cranmer on the basis 
of thirteen articles agreed upon by a conference of 
three English Bishops, four English doctors, and two 
German missionaries, Boyneburg and Myconius, in 



314 ENGLAND 

May, 1538. Cranmer hoped to make his statement 
irenic; and in fact it contained some Eoman and Cal- 
vinistic elements, but in the main it was Lutheran. 
Justification by faith was asserted; only two sacra- 
ments were retained. Transubstantiation was de- 
nounced as repugnant to Scripture and private masses 
as ^'dangerous impostures." The real presence was 
maintained in a Lutheran sense: the bread was said 
to be the Body of Christ, and the wine the Blood of 
Christ, but only after a heavenly and spiritual man- 
ner. It was said that by Christ 's ordinance the sacra- 
ment is not reserved, carried about, lifted up, or wor- 
shipped. 

A reform of the clergy was also undertaken, and 
was much needed. In 1551 Bishop Hooper found in 
his diocese of 311 clergymen, 171 could not repeat the 
Ten Commandments, ten could not say the Lord's 
Prayer in English, seven could not tell who was its 
author, and sixty-two were absentees, chiefly because 
of pluralities. 

The notable characteristic of the Edwardian Eefor- 
mation was its mildness. There were no Catholic 
martyrs. It is true that heretics coming under the 
category of blasphemers or deniers of Christianity 
could still be put to death by common law, and two 
men were actually executed for speculations about the 
divinity of Christ, but such cases were wholly excep- 
tional. 
Social The social disorders of the time, coming to a head, 

seemed to threaten England with a rising of the lower 
classes similar to the Peasants' War of 1525 in Ger- 
many. The events in England prove that, however 
much these ebullitions might be stimulated by the at- 
mosphere of the religious change, they were not the 
direct result of the new gospel. In the west of Eng- 
land and in Oxfordshire the lower classes rebelled 



disorders 



REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI 315 

under the leadership of Catholic priests; in the east 
the rising, known as Rett's rebellion, took on an Ana- 
baptist character. The real causes of discontent were 
the same in both cases. The growing wealth of the 
commercial classes had widened the gap between rich 
and poor. The inclosures continued to be a grievance, 
by the ejection of small tenants and the appropriation 
of common lands. But by far the greatest cause of 
hardship to the poor was the debasement of the coin- 
age. Wheat, barley, oats and cattle rose in price to 
two or three times their previous cost, while wages, 
kept down by law, rose only 11 per cent. No wonder 
that the condition of the laborer had become impos- 
sible. 

The demands of the eastern rising, centering at Nor- 
wich, bordered on communism. The first was for the 
enfranchisement of all bondsmen for the reason that 
Christ had made all men free. Inclosures of commons 
and private property in game and fish were denounced 
and further agrarian demands were voiced. The 
rebels committed no murder and little sacrilege, but 
vented their passions by slaughtering vast numbers 
of sheep. All the peasant risings were suppressed by 
the government, and the economic forces continued to 
operate against the wasteful agricultural system of 
the time and in favor of wool-growing and manufac- 
ture. 

After five years under Protector Somerset there Execution 

'' _ _ oi bomerset, 

was a change of government signalized, as usual un- January 22, 
der Henry VIII, by the execution of the resigning }^^^ 
minister. Somerset suffered from the unpopularity 
of the new religious policy in some quarters and from 
that following the peasants' rebellion in others. As 
usual, the government was blamed for the economic 
evils of the time and for once, in having debased the 
coinage, justly. Moreover the Protector had been in- 



316 ENGLAND 

volved by scheming rivals in the odium more than in 
the guilt of fratricide, for this least bloody of all Eng- 
lish ministers in that century, had executed his brother, 
Thomas, Baron Seymour, a rash and ambitious man 
rightly supposed to be plotting his own advancement 
by a royal marriage. 

Among the leaders of the Reformation belonging to 
the class of mere adventurers, John Dudley, Earl of 
Warwick, was the ablest and the w^orst. As the Pro- 
tector held quasi-royal powers, he could only be de- 
posed by using the person of the young king. War- 
wick ingratiated himself wdth Edward and brought 
the child of thirteen to the council. Of course he could 
only speak what was taught him, but the name of roy- 
alty had so dread a prestige that none dared disobey 
him. At his command "Warwick was created Duke of 
NorUium- Northumberland, and his confederate, Henry Grey 
bcriand :^[arquis of Dorset, was created Duke of Suffolk. A 
little later these men, again using the person of the 
king, had Somerset tried and executed. 

The conspirators did not long enjoy their triumph. 
While Edward lived and was a minor they were safe, 
but Edward was a consumptive visibly declining. 
They had no hope of perpetuating their power save to 
alter the succession, and this they tried to do. An- 
other Earl of Warwick had been a king-maker, wiiy 
not the present one? Henry VIII 's will appointed to 
succeed him, in case of Edward's death without issue, 
(1) Mary, (2) Elizabeth, (3) the heirs of his younger 
sister Mary who had married Charles Brandon, Duke 
of Suffolk. Of this marriage there had been born two 
daughters, the elder of whom, Frances, married Henry 
Grey, recently created Duke of SulTolk. The issue of 
this marriage were three daughters, and the eldest of 
them. Lady Jane Grey, was picked by the two dukes 
as the heir to the throne, and W9.s jnarried to Northum- 



CATHOLIC EEACTION UNDER MARY 317, 



berland's son, Guilford Dudley. The young king was 
now appealed to, on the ground of his religious feeling, 
to alter the succession so as to exclude not only his 
Catholic sister Mary but his lukewarm sister Eliza- 
beth in favor of the strongly Protestant Lady Jane. 
Though his la\\^ers told him he could not alter the 
succession to the crown, he intimidated tliem into draw- 
ing up a ''devise" purporting to do this. 

§ 3. The Catholic Reaction Under Mary. 1553-58 

When Edward died on July 6, 1553, Northumber- 
land had taken such precautions as he could to ensure 
the success of his project. He had gathered his own 
men at London and tried to secure help from France, 
whose king would have been only too glad to involve 
England in civil war. The death of the king was con- 
cealed for four days w^hile preparations were being 
made, and then Queen Jane was proclaimed. Mary's 
challenge arrived the next day and she (Mary) at once 
began raising an army. Had her person been secured 
the plot might have succeeded, but she avoided the set 
snares. Charles V wished to support her for religious 
reasons, but feared to excite patriotic feeling by dis- 
patching an army and therefore confined his interven- 
tion to diplomatic representations to Northumberland. 

There was no doubt as to the choice of the people. 
Even the strongest Protestants hated civil turmoil 
more than they did Catholicism, and the people as a 
whole felt instinctively that if the crown was put up as 
a prize for unscrupulous politicians there would be no 
end of strife. All therefore flocked to Mary, and al- 
most without a struggle she overcame the conspirators 
and entered her capital amid great rejoicing. North- 
umberland, after a despicable and fruitless recanta- 
tion, was executed and so were his son and his son's 
wife. Queen Jane. Sympathy was felt for her on ac- 



Proclama- 
tion of 
Queen Jane, 
July 10, 
1553 



Accession 
of Mary 



318 ENGLAND 

count of her youth, beauty and remarkable talents, 
but none for her backers. 

The relief with which the settlement was regarded 
gave the new queen at least the good will of the na- 
tion to start with. This she gradually lost. Just as 
Elizabeth instinctively did the popular thing, so Mary 
seemed almost by fatality to choose the worst course 
possible. Her foreign policy, in the first place, was 
both un-English and unsuccessful. Almost at once 
Charles V proposed his son Philip as Mary's husband, 
Marriage ^nd, after about a year of negotiation, the marriage 
and PMip, ^^^k place. The tremendous unpopularity of this step 
July 25, was due not so much to hostility to Spain, though Spain 
was beginning to be regarded as the national foe 
rather than France, but to the fear of a foreign domi- 
nation. England had never before been ruled by a 
queen, if we except the disastrous reign of Mathilda, 
and it was natural to suppose that Mary's husband 
should have the prerogative as well as the title of king. 
In vain Philip tried to disabuse the English of the idea 
that he was asserting any independent claims ; in some 
way the people felt that they were being annexed to 
Spain, and they hated it. 

The religious aim of the marriage, to aid in the 
restoration of Catholicism, was also disliked. Car- 
dinal Pole frankly avowed this purpose, declaring that 

as Christ, being heir of the world, was sent down by his 
Father from the royal throne, to be at once Spouse and 
Son of the Virgin Mary and to be made the Comforter 
and Saviour of mankind ; so, in like manner, the greatest 
of all princes upon earth, the heir of his father's king- 
dom, departed from his own broad and happy realms that 
he, too, might come hither into this land of trouble, to be 
the spouse and son of this virgin Mary ... to aid in the 
reconciliation of this people to Christ and the church. 

For Mary herself the marriage was most unhappy. 



CATHOLIC REACTION [UNDER MARY 319 

She was a bride of thirty-eight, already worn and aged 
by grief and care; her bridegroom was only twenty- 
seven. She adored him, but he almost loathed her and 
made her miserable by neglect and unfaithfulness. 
Her passionate hopes for a child led her to believe 
and announce that she was to have one, and her dis- 
appointment was correspondingly bitter. 

So unpopular was the marriage coupled with the 
queen's religious policy, that it led to a rebellion un- 
der Sir Thomas Wyatt. Though suppressed, it was a 
dangerous symptom, especially as Mary failed to profit 
by the warning. Her attempts to implicate her sister 
Elizabeth in the charge of treason failed. 

Had Mary's foreign policy only been strong it might 
have conciliated the patriotic pride of the ever present 
jingo. But under her leadership England seemed to 
decline almost to its nadir. The command of the sea 
was lost and, as a consequence of this and of the mili- 
tary genius of the Duke of Guise, Calais, held for 
over two centuries, was conquered by the French. 1553 
With the subsequent loss of Guines the last English 
outpost on the continent was reft from her. Religious 

Notwithstanding Mary 's saying that * ' Calais ' ' would P°^*^y 
be found in her heart when she died, by far her deep- 
est interest was the restoration of Catholicism. To 
assist her in this task she had Cardinal Reginald Pole, 
in whose veins flowed the royal blood of England and 
whom the pope appointed as legate to the kingdom. 
Though Mary's own impulse was to act strongly, she 
sensibly adopted the emperor's advice to go slowly 
and, as far as possible, in legal forms. Within a 
month of her succession she issued a proclamation 
stating her intention to remain Catholic and her hope 
that her subjects would embrace the same religion, 
but at the same time disclaiming the intention of 
forcing them and forbidding strife and the use of 



320 ENGLAND 

** those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic 
or such like." 

Elections to the first Parliament were free ; it passed 
two noteworthy Acts of Repeal, the first restoring the 
■^ status quo at the death of Henry VIII, the second re- 

Repeal of storine: the status quo of 1529 on the eve of the Refor- 

neiorming " 

acts mation Parliament. This second act abolished eight- 

een statutes of Henry VIII and one of Edward VI, 
but it refused to restore the church lands. The fate 
of the confiscated ecclesiastical property was one of the 
greatest obstacles, if not the greatest, in the path of 
reconciliation Avith Rome. The pope at first insisted 
upon it, and Pole was deeply grieved at being obliged 
to absolve sinners who kept the fruits of their sins. 
But the English, as the Spanish ambassador Renard 
wrote, "would rather get themselves massacred than 
let go" the abbey lands. The very Statute of Repeal, 
therefore, that in other respects met Mary's demands, 
carefully guarded the titles to the secularized lands, 
making all suits relating to them triable only in crown 
courts. 

The second point on which Parliament, truly repre- 
senting a large section of public opinion, was obstinate, 
was in the refusal to recognize the papal supremacy. 
The people as a whole cared not what dogma they were 
supposed to believe, but they for the most part cor- 
dially hated the pope. They therefore agreed to pass 
the acts of repeal only on condition that nothing was 
said about the royal supremacy. To Mary's insistence 
they returned a blank refusal to act and she was com- 
pelled to wait ''while Parliament debated articles that 
might well puzzle a general council," as a contem- 
porary wrote. 

Lords and Commons were quite willing to pass acts 
to strengthen the crown and then to leave the responsi- 



CATHOLIC REACTION UNDER MARY 321 

bility for further action to it. Thus the divorce of 
Henry and Catharine of Aragon was repealed and the Revival of 
treason laws were revived. Going even beyond the j^^^^^" 
limit of Henry VIII it was made treason to ''pray or 
desire" that God would shorten the queen's days. 
Worse than that, Parliament revived the heresy laws. 
It is a strange comment on the nature of legislatures 
that they have so often, as in this case, protected prop- • 
erty better than life, and made money more sacred 
than conscience. However, it was not Parliament but 
the executive that carried out to its full extent the 
policy of persecution and religious reaction. 

The country soon showed its opposition. A tem- 
porary disarray that might have been mistaken for 
disintegration had been joroduced in the Protestant 
ranks by the recantation of Northumberland. The 
restoration of the mass was accomplished in orderly 
manner in most places. The English formulas had 
been patient of a Catholic interpretation, and doubt- 
less many persons regarded the change from one 
liturgy to the other as a matter of slight importance. 
Moreover the majority made a principle of conformity 
to the government, believing that an act of the laAV re- 
lieved the conscience of the individual of responsibil- 
ity. But even so, there was a large minority of recus- 
ants. Of 8800 beneficed clergy in England, 2000 were 
ejected for refusal to comply. A very large number 
fled to the Continent, forming colonies at Frankfort-on- 
the-Main and at Geneva and scattering in other places. 
The opinion of the imperial ambassador Reuard that 
English Protestants depended entirely on support 
from abroad was tolerably true for this reign, for their 
books continued to be printed abroad, and a few fur- 
ther translations from foreign reformers were made. 
It is noteworthy that these mostly treat of the ques- 



322 



ENGLAITD 



Passive 
resistance 



Martyrs, 
October 16, 
1555 



tion, then so much in debate, whether Protestants 
might innocently attend the mass. 

Other expressions of the temper of the people were 
the riots in London. On the last day of the first Par- 
liament a dog with a tonsured crown, a rope around 
its neck and a writing signifying that priests and bish- 
ops should be hung, was thrown through a window into 
the queen's presence chamber. At another time a cat 
was found tonsured, surpliced, and with a wafer in 
its mouth in derision of the mass. The perpetrators 
of these outrages could not be found. 

A sterner, though passive, resistance to the govern- 
ment was gloriously evinced when stake and rack be- 
gan to do their work. Mary was totally unprepared 
for the strength of Protestant feeling in the country. 
She hoped a few executions would strike terror into 
the hearts of all and render further persecution un- 
necessary. But from the execution of the first martyr, 
John Eogers, it was plain that the people sympathized 
with the victims rather than feared their fate. Not 
content with warring on the living, Mary even broke 
the sleep of the dead.^ The bodies of Bucer and Fa- 
gius were dug up and burned. The body of Peter 
Martyr's wife was also exhumed, though, as no evi- 
dence of heresy could be procured, it was thrown on a 
dunghill to rot. 

The most famous victims were Latimer, Eidley and 
Cranmer. The first two were burnt alive together, 
Latimer at the stake comforting his friend by assuring 
him, "This day we shall light such a candle, by God's 
grace, in England, as I trust, shall never be put out." 
A special procedure was reserved for Cranmer, as 
primate. Every effort was made to get him to recant. 
He at first signed four submissions recognizing the 

1 The canon law forbade the burial of heretics in consecrated 
ground, but it is said that Charles V refused to dig up Luther's body 
when he took Wittenberg. 



CATHOLIC REACTION UNDER MARY 323 

power of the pope as and if restored by Parliament. 
He then signed two real recantations, and finally drew 
up a seventh document, repudiating his recantations, 
re-affirming his faith in the Protestant doctrine of the 
sacraments and denouncing the pope. By holding his 
right hand in the fire, when he was burned at the stake, 
he testified his bitter repentance for its act in signing March 21, 
the recantations. ^^^ 

The total number of martyrs in Mary's reign fell 
very little, if at all, short of 300. The lists of them 
are precise and circumstantial. The geographical dis- 
tribution is interesting, furnishing, as it does, the only 
statistical information available in the sixteenth cen- 
tury for the spread of Protestantism. It graphically 
illustrates the fact, so often noticed before, that the 
strongholds of the new opinions were the commercial 
towns of the south and east. If a straight line be 
drawn from the Wash to Portsmouth, passing about 
twenty miles west of London, it will roughly divide the 
Protestant from the Catholic portions of England. 
Out of 290 martyrdoms known, 247 took place east of 
this line, that is, in the city of London and the coun- 
ties of Essex, Hertford, Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Suf- 
folk and Cambridge. Thirteen are recorded in the 
south center, at "Winchester and Salisbury, eleven at 
the western ports of the Severn, Bristol and Glouces- 
ter. There were three in Wales, all on the coast at 
St. David's; one in the south-western peninsula at 
Exeter, a few in the midlands, and not one north of 
Lincolnshire and Cheshire. 

When it is said that the English changed their re- 
ligion easily, this record of heroic opposition must be 
remembered to the contrary. Mary's reign became 
more and more hateful to her people until at last it is 
possible that only the prospect of its speedy termina- 
tion prevented a rebellion. The popular epithet of 



324 ENGLAND 

** bloody '^ rightly distinguishes her place in the esti- 
mate of history. It is true that her persecution sinks 
into insignificance compared with the holocausts of 
victims to the inquisition in the Netherlands. But the 
English people naturally judged by their own history, 
and in all of that such a reign of terror was unexam- 
pled. The note of Mary's reign is sterility and its 
achievement was to create, in reaction to the policy 
then pursued, a ferocious and indelible hatred of Rome. 

§ 3. The Elizabethan Settlement. 1558-88. 

Elizabeth, However numerous and thorny were the problems 
1558-1603 ppeggg^j for solution into the hands of the maiden of 
twenty-five now called upon to rule England, the great- 
est of all questions, that of religion, almost settled it- 
self. It is extremely hard to divest ourselves of the 
wisdom that comes after the event and to put ourselves 
in the position of the men of that time and estimate 
fairly the apparent feasibility of various alternatives. 
But it is hard to believe that the considerations that 
seem so overwhelming to us should not have forced 
themselves upon the attention of the more thoughtful 
men of that generation. 

In the first place, while the daughter of Anne Boleyn 
was predestined by heredity and breeding to oppose 
Rome, yet she was brought up in the Anglican Cath- 
olicism of Henry VTII. At the age of eleven she had 
translated Margaret of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinful 
Soul, a w^ork expressing the spirit of devotion joined 
with liberalism in creed and outward conformity in 
cult. The rapid vicissitudes of faith in England taught 
her tolerance, and her own acute intellect and prac- 
tical sense inclined her to indifference. She did not 
scruple to give all parties. Catholic, Lutheran and Cal- 
vinist, the impression, when it suited her, that she was 
almost in a s:r cement with each of them. The accusa- 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 325 

tion that she was "an atheist and a maintainer of 
atheism" meant no more than that her interests were 1601 
secular. She once said that she would rather hear 
a thousand masses than be guilty of the millions of 
crimes perpetrated by some of those who had sup- 
pressed the mass. She liked candles, crucifixes and 
ritual just as she inordinately loved personal display. 
And politicall}^ she learned very early to fear the re- 
publicanism of Knox. 

The conservatism of Elizabeth's policy was deter- Most of 
mined also by the consideration that, though the more catLuc 
intelligent and progressive classes were Protestant, 
the mass of the people still clung to the Roman faith, 
and, if they had no other power, had at least the vis 
inertiae. Accurate figures cannot be obtained, but a 
number of indications are significant. Li 1559 Con- 
vocation asserted the adherence of the clergy to the an- 
cient faith. Maurice Clenoch estimated in 1561 that 
the majority of the people would welcome foreign in- 
tervention in favor of Mary Stuart and the old faith. 
Nicholas Sanders, a contemporary Catholic apologist, 
said that the common people of that period were di- 
vided into three classes: husbandmen, shepherds and 
mechanics. The first two classes he considered en- 
tirely Catholic; the third class, he said, were not 
tainted with schism as a whole, but only in some parts, 
those, namely of sedentary occupation such as weavers, 
cobblers and some lazy *'aulici," i.e. servants and 
humble retainers of the great. The remote parts of 
the kingdom, he added, were least tainted with heresy 
and, as the towns were few and small, he estimated that 
less than one per cent, of the population was Protes- 
tant. Though these figures are a tremendous exag- 
geration of the proportion of Catholics, some support 
may bo found for them in the information sent to the 
Curia in 1567 that 32 English nobles were Catholic, 20 



326 



ENGLAND 



But most 
powerful 
class 
Protestants 



well affected to the Catholics and 15 Protestants. Only 
slightly different is the report sent in 1571 that at that 
time 33 English peers were Catholic, 15 doubtful and 
16 heretical. As a matter of fact, in religious ques- 
tions we find that the House of Lords would have been 
Catholic but for the bishops, a solid phalanx of gov- 
ernment nominees. 

But if the masses were Catholic, the strategically 
situated classes were Keformed. The first House of 
Commons of Elizabeth proved by its acts to be strongly 
Protestant. The assumption generally made that it 
was packed by the government has been recently ex- 
ploded. Careful testing shows that there was hardly 
any government interference. Of the 390 members, 
168 had sat in earlier Parliaments of Mary, and that 
was just the normal proportion of old members. It 
must be remembered that the parliamentary franchise 
approached the democratic only in the towns, the 
strongholds of Protestantism, and that in the small 
boroughs and in some of the counties the election was 
determined by just that middle class most progressive 
and at this time most Protestant. 

Another test of the temper of the country is the 
number of clergj^ refusing the oath of supremacy. 
Out of a total number of about nine thousand only 
about two hundred lost their livings as recusants, and 
most of these were Mary's appointees. 

The same impression of Protestantism is given by 
the literature of the time. The fifty-six volumes of 
Elizabethan divinity published by the Parker Society 
testify to the number of Reformation treaties, tracts, 
hymns and letters of this period. During the first 
thirty years of Elizabeth's reign there were fifteen new 
translations of Luther's works, not counting a num- 
ber of reprints, two new translations from Melanch- 
thon, thirteen from Bullinger and thirty-four from Cal- 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 327 

vin. Notwithstanding this apparently large foreign 
influence, the English Reformation at this time re- 
sumed the national character temporarily lost during 
Mary's reign. John Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae An- 1562 
glicanae has been called by Creighton, ''the first me- 
thodical statement of the position of the church of 
England against the church of Rome, and the ground- 
work of all subsequent controversy. ' ' 

Finally, most of the prominent men of the time, and 
most of the rising young men, were Protestants. The 
English sea-captains, wolves of the sea as they were, 
found it advisable to disguise themselves in the sheep 's 
clothing of zeal against the idolater. More creditable 
to the cause was the adherence of men like Sir William 
Cecil, later Lord Burghley, a man of cool judgment 
and decent conversation. Coverdale, still active, was 
made a bishop. John Foxe published, all in the inter- 
ests of his faith, the most popular and celebrated his- 
tory of the time. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's tutor, 
still looked to Lutheran Germany as "a place where 
Christ's doctrine, the fear of God, punishment of sin, 
and discipline of honesty were held in special regard." 
Edmund Spenser's great allegory, as well as some of 
his minor poems, were largely inspired by Anglican 
and Calvinistic purposes. 

It was during Elizabeth's reign that the Roman Conversion 
Catholics lost the majority they claimed in 1558 and 
became the tiny minority they have ever since re- 
mained. The time and to some extent the process 
through which this came to pass can be traced with 
fair accuracy. In 1563 the policy of the government, 
till then wavering, became more decided, indicating 
that the current had begun to set in favor of Protes- 
tantism. The failure of the Northern rising and of 
the papal bull in 1569—70, indicated the weakness of 
the ancient faith. In 1572 a careful estimate of the 



of the 
masses 



328 ENGLAND 

Carieton's religious state of England was made by a contempo- 
estimate rary, who thought that of the three classes into which 
he divided the population, papist, Protestant and ath- 
eist (by which he probably meant, indifferent) the first 
was smaller than either of the other two. Ten years 
later (1580-85) the Jesuit mission in England claimed 
120,000 converts. But in reality these adherents were 
not new converts, but the remnant of Eomanism re- 
maining faithful. If we assume, as a distinguished 
historian has done, that this number included nearly 
all the obstinately devoted, as the population of Eng- 
land and Wales was then about 4,000,000, the propor- 
tion of Catholics was only about 3 per cent, of the total, 
at which percentage it remained constant during the 
next century. But there were probably a considerable 
number of timid Roman Catholics not daring to make 
themselves known to the Jesuit mission. But even 
allowing liberally for these, it is safe to say that by 
1585 the members of that church had sunk to a very 
small minority. 

Those who see in the conversion of the English peo- 
ple the result merely of government pressure must 
explain two inconvenient facts. The first is that the 
Puritans, who were more strongly persecuted than the 
papists, waxed mightily notwithstanding. The second 
is that, during the period when the conversion of the 
masses took place, there were no martyrdoms and 
there was little persecution. The change was, in fact, 
but the inevitable completion and consequence of the 
conversion of the leaders of the people earlier. With 
the masses, doubtless, the full contrast between the 
old and the new faiths was not realized. Attending the 
same churches if not the same church, using a liturgy 
which some hoped would obtain papal sanction, and 
ignorant of the changes made in translation from the 
Latin ritual, the uneducated did not trouble themselves 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 329 

about abstruse questions of dogma or even about more 
obvious matters such as the supremacy of the pope and 
the marriage of the clergy. Moreover, there were 
strong positive forces attracting them to the Anglican 
communion. They soon learned to love the English 
prayer-book, and the Bible became so necessary that 
the Catholics were obliged to produce a version of their 
own. English insularity and patriotism drew them 
powerfully to the bosom of their omti peculiar com- 
munion. 

Though we can now see that the forces drawing Elizabeth's 
England to the Reformation were decisive, the policy ^'^^^^ 
of Elizabeth was at first cautious. The old services 
went on until Parliament had spoken. As with Henry 
VIII, so with this daughter of his, scrupulous legality 
of form marked the most revolutionary acts. Eliza- 
beth had been proclaimed ''Queen of England, France 
and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c," this ''&c" 
being chosen to stand in place of the old title "Supreme 
Head of the Church," thus dodging the question of its 
assumption or omission. Parliament, however, very 
soon passed supremacy and uniformity acts to supply 
the needed sanction. The former repealed Philip and 
Mary's Heresy Act and Kepealing Statute, revived ten 
acts of Henry VIII and one of Edward VI, but con- 
firmed the repeal of six acts of Henry VIII. Next, 
Parliament proceeded to seize the episcopal lands. Its 
spirit was just as secular as that of Henry's Parlia- 
ments, only there was less ecclesiastical property left 
to grab. 

The Book of Common Prayer was revised by intro- 
ducing into the recension of 1552 a few passages from 
the first edition of 1549, previously rejected as too 
Catholic. Three of the Forty-two Articles of Religion The Thirty- 
of Edward were dropped, thus making the Thirty-nine "'"eArti- 
Articles that have ever since been the authoritative 1553 



330 



ENGLAND 



The Church 
of England 



Succession 



statement of Anglican doctrine. Thus it is true to 
some extent that the Elizabethan settlement was a 
compromise. It took special heed of various parties, 
and tried to avoid offence to Lutherans, Zwinglians, 
and even to Roman Catholics. But far more than a 
compromise, it was a case of special development. As 
it is usually compared with the English Dissenting 
sects, the church of England is often said to be the 
most conservative of the reformed bodies. It is often 
said that it is Protestant in doctrine and Catholic in 
ritual and hierarchy. But compared with the Lu- 
theran church it is found to be if anything further 
from Rome. In fact the Anglicans of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries abhorred the Lutherans as 
''semi-papists." 

And yet the Anglican church was like the Lutheran 
not only in its conservatism as compared with Calvin- 
ism, but in its political aspects. Both became the 
strong allies of the throne; both had not only a 
markedly national but a markedly governmental qual- 
ity. Just as the Reformation succeeded in England by 
becoming national in opposition to Spain, and remain- 
ing national in opposition to French culture, so the 
Anglican church naturally became a perfect expression 
of the English character. Moderate, decorous, detest- 
ing extremes of speculation and enthusiasm, she cares 
less for logic than for practical convenience. 

Closely interwoven with the religious settlement 
were the questions of the heir to the throne and of 
foreign policy. Elizabeth's life was the only break- 
water that stood between the people and a Catholic, 
if not a disputed, succession. The nearest heir was 
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a granddaughter of Mar- 
garet Tudor, Henry VIII 's sister. As a Catholic and 
a Frenchwoman, half by race and wholly by her first 
marriage to Francis II, she would have been most dis- 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 331 

tasteful to the ruling party in England. Elizabeth was 
therefore desired and finally urged by Parliament to 
marry. Her refusal to do this has been attributed to 
some hidden cause, as her love for Leicester or the 
knowledge that she was incapable of bearing a child. 
But though neither of these hypotheses can be dis- 
proved, neither is necessary to account for her policy. 
It is true that it would have strengthened her position 
to have had a child to succeed her; but it would have 
weakened her personal sway to have had a husband. 
She wanted to rule as well as to reign. Her many 
suitors were encouraged just sufficiently to flatter her 
vanity and to attain her diplomatic ends. First, her 
brother-in-law Philip sought her hand, and was 
promptly rejected as a Spanish Catholic. Then, there 
was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, apparently her 
favorite in spite of his worthless character, but his 
rank was not high enough. Then, there were princes 
of Sweden and Denmark, an Archduke of Austria and 
two sons of Catharine de' Medici's. The suit of one of 
the latter began when Elizabeth was thirty-nine years 
old and he was nineteen and continued for ten years 
with apparent zest on both sides. Parliament put all 
the pressure it could upon the queen to make her flirta- 
tions end in matrimony, but it only made Elizabeth 
angry. Twice she forbade discussion of the matter, 
and, though she afterwards consented to hear the peti- 
tion, she was careful not to call another Parliament 
for five years. 

Vexatious financial difficulties had been left to Eliza- Financial 

measures 

beth. Largely owing to the debasement of the cur- 
rency royal expenditure had risen from £56,000 per 
annum at the end of Henry's reign to £345,000 in the 
last year of Marj^'s reign. The government's credit 
was in a bad way, and the commerce of the kingdom 
deranged. By the wise expedient of calling in the de- 1560 



1566 



332 ENGLAND 

based coins issued since 1543, the hardest problems 
were solved. 
Underhand Towards France and Spain Elizabeth's policy was 
^^^ one well described by herself as ** underhand war." 

English volunteers, with government connivance, but 
nominall}^ on their own responsibility, fought in the 
ranks of Huguenots and Netherlanders. Torrents of 
money poured from English churches to support their 
fellow-Protestants in France and Holland. English 
sailors seized Spanish galleons ; if successful the queen 
secretly shared the spoil ; but if they were caught they 
might be hanged as pirates by Philip or Alva. This 
condition, unthinkable now, was allowed by the inchoate 
state of international law; the very idea of neutrality 
was foreign to the time. States were always trying 
to harm and overreach each other in secret ways. In 
Elizabethan England the anti-papal and anti-Spanish 
ardor of the mariners made possible this buccaneering 
without government support, had not the rich prizes 
themselves been enough to attract the adventurous. 
Doubtless far more energy went into privateering than 
into legitimate commerce. 

Peace was officially made with France, recognizing 
the surrender of Calais at first for a limited period of 
years. Though peace was still nominally kept with 
Spain for a long time, the shift of policy from one 
of hostility to France to one of enmity to Spain was 
soon manifest. As long, however, as the government 
relied chiefly on the commercial interests of the capital 
and other large towns, and as long as Spain controlled 
the Netherlands, open war was nearly impossible, for 
it would have been extremely unpopular with the mer- 
chants of both London and the Low Countries. In 
1569 times of crisis, however, an embargo was laid on all 

trade with Philip's dominions. 
Elizabeth's position was made extremely delicate by 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 333 

the fact that the heiress to her throne was the Scotch 
Queen Mary Stuart, who, since 1568, had been a re- 
fugee in England and had been kept in a sort of honor- 
able captivity. On account of her religion she became 
the center of the hopes and of the actual machinations 
of all English malcontents. In these plots she partici- 
pated as far as she dared. 

Elizabeth 's crown would have been jeoparded had the The Cath- 
Catholic powers, or any one of them, acted promptly, ^hc Powers 
That they did not do so is proof, partly of their mutual 
jealousies, party of the excellence of Cecil's statesman- 
ship. Convinced though he was that civil peace could 
only be secured by religious unity, for five years he 
played a hesitating game in order to hold off the Cath- 
olics until his power should be strong enough to crush 
them. By a system of espionage, by permitting only 
nobles and sailors to leave the kingdom without special 
licence, by welcoming Dutch Protestant refugees, he 
clandestinely fostered the strength of his party. His 
scheme was so far successful that the pope hesitated 
more than eleven years before issuing the bull of dep- 
rivation. For this Elizabeth had also to thank the 
Catholic Hapsburgs ; in the first place Philip who then 
hoped to marry her, and in the second place the Em- 
peror Ferdinand who said that if Elizabeth were ex- 
communicated the German Catholics would suffer for 
it and that there were many German Protestant princes 
who deserved the ban as much as she did. 

Matters were clarified by the calling of the Council of 
Trent. Asked to send an embassy to this council 
Elizabeth refused for three reasons: (1) because she 
had not been consulted about calling the council; (2) 
because she did not consider it free, pious and Chris- 
tian; (3) because the pope sought to stir up sedition 
in her realms. The council replied to this snub by 
excommunicating her, but it is a significant sign of the 



334 ENGLAND 

times that neither they nor the pope as yet dared to 
use spiritual weapons to depose her, as the pope en- 
deavored to do a few years later. 
oHckws ' Whether as a reply to this measure or not, Parlia- 
1563 ment passed more stringent laws against Catholics. 

Cecil's policy, inherited from Thomas Cromwell, to 
centralize and unify the state, met with threefold op- 
position; first from the papists who disliked national- 
izing the church, second from the holders of medieval 
franchises who objected to their absorption in a cen- 
tripetal system, and third from the old nobles who re- 
sented their replacement in the royal council by up- 
starts. All these forces produced a serious crisis in 
the years 1569-70. The north, as the stronghold of 
both feudalism and Catholicism, led the reaction. The 
Duke of Norfolk, England's premier peer, plotted 
w^ith the northern earls to advance Mary's cause, and 
thought of marrying her himself. Pope Pious V 
warmly praised their scheme which culminated in a 
2551 ' rebellion. The nobles and commons alike were filled 
with the spirit of crusaders, bearing banners with the 
cross and the five wounds of Christ. At the same time 
they voiced the grievance of the old-fashioned farmer 
against the new-fangled merchant. Their banners in- 
scribed *'God speed the plough" bear witness to the 
agrarian element common to so many revolts. Their 
demands were the restoration of Catholicism, interven- 
tion in Scotland to put Mary back on her throne, and 
her recognition as heiress of England, and the expul- 
sion of foreign refugees. Had they been able to secure 
Mary's person or had the Scotch joined them, it is 
probable that they would have seceded from the south 
of England. 

But the new Pilgrimage of Grace was destined to no 
more success than the old one. Moray, Eegent of 
Scotland, forcibly prevented assistance going to the 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 335 

rebels from North Britain. Elizabeth prepared an 
overwhelming army, but it was not needed. The reb- 
els, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, dispersed 
and were pursued by an exemplary punishment, no less , 
than eight hundred being executed. Three years later 
Norfolk trod the traitor's path to the scaffold. His 
death sealed the ruin of the old nobility whose priv- 
ileges were incompatible w^ith the new regime. In the 
same year a parliamentary agitation in favor of the 
execution of Mary witnessed how dead were medieval 
titles to respect. 

Too late to have much effect, Pius V issued the Papal Bull, 
bull Regnans in excelsis, declaring that w^hercas the 25,1570 
Koman pontiff has power over all nations and king- 
doms to destroy and ruin or to plant and build up, and 
whereas Elizabeth, the slave of vice, has usurped the 
place of supreme head of the church, has sent her realm 
to perdition and has celebrated the impious mysteries 
of Calvin, therefore she is cut off from the body of 
Christ and deprived of her pretended right to rule 
England, while all her subjects are absolved from their 
oaths of allegiance. The bull also reasserted Eliza- 
beth's illegitimacy, and echoed the complaint of the 
northern earls that she had expelled the old nobility 
from her council. The promulgation of the bull, with- 
out the requisite warning and allowance of a year for 
repentance, was contrary to the canon law. 

The fulmination was sent to Alva to the Netherlands 
and a devotee was found to carry it to England. 
Forthwith Elizabeth issued a masterly proclamation 
vouchsafing that, 

her majesty would have all her loving subjects to under- 
stand that, as long as they shall openly continue in the 
observation of her laws, and shall not wilfully and mani- 
festly break them by open actions, her majesty's means 
is not to have any of them molested by any inquisition or 



336 ENGLAND 

examination of their consciences in causes of religion, but 
to accept and entreat them as her good and obedient sub- 
jects. 

But to obviate the contamination of her people by 
political views expressed in the bull, and to guard 

Anti-papal against the danger of a further rising in the interests 
of Mary Stuart, the Parliament of 1571 passed sev- 
eral necessary laws. One of these forbade bringing 
the bull into England ; another made it treasonable to 
declare that Elizabeth was not or ought not to be 
queen or that she was a heretic, usurper or schismatic. 
The first seventeen years of Elizabeth's reign had 
been blessedly free from persecution. The increasing 
strain between England and the papacy was marked by 
a number of executions of Romanists. A recent Cath- 
olic estimate is that the total number of this faith who 
suffered under Elizabeth was 189, of whom 128 were 
priests, 58 laymen and three women ; and to this should 
be added 32 Franciscans who died in prison of starva- 
tion. The contrast of 221 victims in Elizabeth's forty- 
five years as against 290 in Mary's five years, is less 
important than the different purpose of the govern- 
ment. Under Mary the executions were for heresy; 
under Elizabeth chiefly for treason. It is true that 
the whole age acted upon Sir Philip Sidney's maxim 
that it was the highest wisdom of statesmanship never 
to separate religion from politics. Church and state 
were practically one and the same body, and opinions 
repugnant to established religion naturally resulted in 
acts inimical to the civil order. But the broad distinc- 
tion is plain. Cecil put men to death not because he 
detested their dogma but because he feared their poli- 
tics. 

Nothing proves more clearly the purposes of the 

Jesuit English government than its long duel with the Jesuit 
mission. It is unfair to say that the primary purpose 



mission 



of Jesuits 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 337 

of the Curia was to get all the privileges of loyalty for 
English Catholics while secretly inciting them to rise 
and murder their sovereign. But the very fact that 
the Jesuits were instructed not to meddle in politics 
and yet were unable to keep clear of the law, proves 
how inextricably politics and religion were inter- 
twined. Immediately drawing the suspicion of Burgh- 
ley, they were put to the ''bloody question" and illeg- 
ally tortured, even while the government felt called 
upon to explain that they were not forced to the rack 
to answer "any question of their supposed conscience" 
but only as to their political opinions. But one of 
these opinions was whether the pope had the right to 
depose the queen. 

The history of these years is one more example of Character 
how much more accursed it is to persecute than to be 
persecuted. The Jesuits sent to England were men of 
the noblest character, daring and enduring all with 
fortitude, showing charity and loving-kindness even to 
their enemies. But the character of their enemies cor- 
respondingly deteriorated. That sense of fair play 
that is the finest English quality disappeared under the 
stress of fanaticism. Not only Jesuits, but Catholic 
women aad children were attacked; one boy of thir- 
teen was racked and executed as a traitor. The per- 
secution by public opinion supplied what the activity 
of the government overlooked. In fact it was the gov- 
ernment that was the moderating factor. The act 
passed in 1585 banishing the Jesuits was intended to 
obviate sterner measures. In dealing with the mass 
of the population Burghley made persecution pay its 
way by resorting to fines as the principal punishment. 
During the last twenty years of the reign no less than 
£6,000 per annum w^as thus collected. 

The helpless rage of the popes against "the Jezebel 
of the north" waxed until one of them, Gregory XIII, 



cies 



338 ENGLAND 

Conspira- Sanctioned an attempt at her assassination. In 1580 
there appeared at the court of Madrid one Humphrey 
Ely, later a secular priest. He informed the papal 
nunciature that some English nobles, mentioned by 
name, had determined to murder Elizabeth but wished 
the pope's own assurance that, in case they lost their 
lives in the attempt, they should not have fallen into 
sin by the deed. After giving his own opinion that the 
bull of Pius V gave all men the right to take arms 
against the queen in any fashion, the nuncio wrote to 
Eome. Prom the papal secretary, speaking in the 
pope's name, he received the following reply: 

As that guilty woman of England rules two so noble 
realms of Christendom, is the cause of so much harm to 
the Catholic faith, and is guilty of the loss of so many 
million souls, there is no doubt that any one who puts 
her out of the world with the proper intention of serving 
God thereby, no.t only commits no sin but even wins 
merit,' especially seeing that the sentence of the late 
Pius V is standing against her. If, therefore, these 
English nobles have really decided to do so fair a work, 
your honor may assure them that they commit no sin. 
Also we may trust in God that they will escape all danger. 
As to your own irregularity [caused to the nuncio as a 
priest by conspiracy to murder] the pope sends you his 
holy blessing.^ 

A conspiracy equally unsuccessful but more famous, 
because discovered at the time, was that of Anthony 
Babington. Burghley's excellent secret service ap- 
prised the government not only of the principals but 
also of aid and support given to them by Philip II 
and Mary Queen of Scots. Parliament petitioned for 
the execution of Mary. Though there was no doubt 
of her guilt, Elizabeth hesitated to give the dangerous 
example of sending a crowned head to the block. 

1 A. O. Meyer : England und die katholische Kirche unter Elizabeth, 
p. 231. 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 339 

With habitual indirection she did her best to get 
Mary's jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, to put her to death 
without a warrant. Failing in this, she finally signed 
the warrant, but when her council acted upon it in iMarybe- 
secret haste lest she should change her mind, she flew ^^^'^^^' 

' . Februarys, 

into a rage and, to prove her innocence, heavily fined i587 
and imprisoned one of the privy council whom she 
selected as scapegoat. 

The war with Spain is sometimes regarded as the War with 
inevitable consequence of the religious opposition of ^^"* 
the chief Catholic and the chief Protestant power. 
But probably the war would never have gone beyond 
the stage of privateering and plots to assassinate in 
which it remained inchoate for so long, had it not been 
for the Netherlands. The comer-stone of English pol- 
icy has been to keep friendly, or weak, the power con- 
trolling the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt. The 
war of liberation in the Netherlands had a twofold 
effect ; in the first place it damaged England's best cus- 
tomer, and secondly, Spanish "f rightfulness" shocked 
the English conscience. For a long time the policy of 
the queen herself was as cynically selfish as it could 
possibly be. She not only w^atched complacently the 
butcheries of Alva, but she plotted and counterplotted, 
now offering aid to the Prince of Orange, now betray- 
ing his cause in a way that may have been sport to her 
but was death to the men she played with. Her aim, 
as far as she had a consistent one, was to allow SjDain 
and the Netherlands to exhaust each other. 

Not only far nobler but, as it proved in the end, far 
wiser, was the action of the Puritan party that poured 
money and recruits into the cause of their oppressed 
fellow-Calvinists. But an equally great ser^'-ice to 
them, or at any rate a greater amount of damage to 
Spain, was done by the hardy buccaneers, Hawkins 
and Drake, who preyed upon the Spanish treasure gal- 



340 ENGLAND 

leons and pillaged the Spanish settlements in the New 
World. These men and their fellows not only cut the 
sinews of Spain 's power but likewise built the fleet. 
England's The eventual naval victory of England was preceded 
sea power -^^^ ^ long course of successf ul diplomacy. As the ag- 
gressor England forced the haughtiest power in Eu- 
rope to endure a protracted series of outrages. Not 
only were rebels supported, not only were Spanish 
fleets taken forcibly into English harbors and there 
stripped of moneys belonging to their government, but 
refugees were protected and Spanish citizens put to 
death by the English queen. Philip and Alva could 
not effectively resent and hardly dared to protest 
against the treatment, because they felt themselves 
powerless. As so often, the island kingdom was pro- 
tected by the ocean and by the proved superiority of 
her seamen. After a score of petty fights all the way 
from the Bay of Biscay to the Pacific Ocean, Spanish 
sailors had no desire for a trial of strength in force. 
But in every respect save in sea power Spain felt 
herself immeasurably superior to her foe. Her wealth, 
her dominions, recently augmented by the annexation 
of Portugal, were enormous ; her army had been tried 
in a hundred battles. England's force w^as doubtless 
underestimated. An Italian expert stated that an 
army of 10,000 to 12,000 foot and 2,000 horse would be 
sufficient to conquer her. Even to the last it was 
thought that an invader would be welcomed by a large 
part of the population, for English refugees never 
wearied of picturing the hatred of the people for their 
queen. 

But the decision was long postponed for two reasons. 
First, Spain was fully employed in subduing the Neth- 
erlands. Secondly, the Catholic powders hoped for the 
accession of Mary. But after the assassination of 
Orange in 1584, and after the execution of the Queen 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 341 

of Scots, these reasons for delay no longer existed. 
Drake carried the naval war to the coasts of Spain 1585 
and to her colonies. The consequent bankruptcy of 
the Bank of Seville and the wounded national pride 
brought home to Spaniards the humiliation of their 
position. All that Philip could do was to pray for help 
and to forbid the importation of English wares. In AprU,l587 
reply Drake fell upon the harbor of Cadiz and de- 
stroyed twenty-four or more warships and vast mili- 
tary stores. 

So at last the decision was taken to crush the one 
power that seemed to maintain the Reformation, to up- 
hold the Huguenots and the Dutch patriots -and to 
harry with impunity the champions of Catholicism. 
Pope Sixtus V, not wishing to hazard anything, prom- 
ised a subsidy of 1,000,000 crowns of gold, the first 
half payable on the landing of the Spanish army, the 
second half two months later. Save this, Philip had 
no promise of help from any Catholic power. 

The huge scale of his preparations was only equaled 
by their vast lack of intelligence, insuring defeat from 
the first. The type of ship adopted was the old galley, 
intended to ram and grapple the enemy but totally un- 
fitted for manoeuvring in the Atlantic gales. The 130 
ships carried 2500 guns, but the artillery, though nu- 
merous, was small, intended rather to be used against 
the enemy crews than against the ships themselves. 
The necessary geographical information for the in- 
vasion of Britain in the year 1588 was procured from 
Caesar's De Bello Gallico. The admiral in chief, the 
Duke of Medina Sidonia, had never even commanded a 
ship before and most of the high officers were equally 
innocent of professional knowledge, for sailors were 
despised as inferior to soldiers. Three-fourths of the 
crews were soldiers, all but useless in naval warfare of 
the ijew type. Blind zeal did little to supply the lack 



342 ENGLAND 

of foresight, though Philip spent hours on his knees 
before the host in intercession for the success of his 
venture. The very names of the ships, though quite 
in accordance with Spanish practice, seem symbolic of 
the holy character of the crusade: Santa Maria de 
Gracia, Neustra Senora del Rosario, San Juan Bap- 
tista, La Concepcion. 

On the English side there was also plenty of fanat- 
ical fury, but it was accompanied by practical sense. 
The grandfathers of Cromwell 's Ironsides had already 
learned, if they had not yet formulated, the maxim, 
*'Fear God and keep your powder dry." Some of the 
ships in the English navy had religious names, but 
many were called by more secular appellations: The 
Bull, The Tiger, The Dreadnought, The Revenge. To 
meet the foe a very formidable and self-confident force 
of about forty-five ships of the best sort had gathered 
from the well-tried ranks of the buccaneers. It is true 
that patronage did some damage to the English serv- 
ice, but it was little compared to that of Spain. Lord 
Howard of Effingham was made admiral on account of 
his title, but the vice-admiral was Sir Francis Drake, 
to whom the chief credit of the action must fall. 
July, 1588 The battle in the Channel was fought for nine days. 
There was no general strategy or tactics ; the English 
simply sought to isolate and sink a ship w^herever they 
could. Their heavier cannon were used against the 
' enemy, and fire-ships were sent among his vessels. 
When six Spanish ships had foundered in the Channel, 
the fleet turned northward to the coasts of Holland. 
During their flight an uncertain number were destroyed 
by the English, and a few more fell a prey to the Sea 
Beggars of Holland. The rest, much battered, turned 
north to sail around Scotland. In the storms nineteen 
ships were wrecked on the coasts of Scotland and Ire- 
land j of thirty-five ships the Spaniards themselves 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 343 

could give no account. For two months Philip was in 
suspense as to the fate of his great Armada, of which 
at last only a riddled and battered remnant returned 
to home harbors. 

The importance of the victory over the Armada, like ^^ 
that of most dramatic events, has been overestimated. 
To contemporaries, at least to the victors and their 
friends it appeared as the direct judgment of God: 
''Plavit Deus et dissipati sunt." The gorgeous rhet- 
oric of Ranke -and Froude has painted it as one of the 
turning points in world history. But in reality it 
rather marked than made an epoch. Had Philip's 
ships won, it is still inconceivable that he could have 
imposed his dominion on England any more than he 
could on the Netherlands. England was ripening and 
Spain was rotting for half a century before the col- 
lision made this fact plain to all. The Armada did not 
end the war nor did it give the death blow to Spanish 
power, much less to Catholicism. On the Continent of 
Europe things went on almost unchanged. 

But in England the effect was considerable. The 
victory stimulated national pride; it strengthened the 
Protestants, and the left wing of that party. Though 
the Catholics had sho^vn themselves loyal during the 
crisis they were subjected, immediately thereafter, to 
the severest persecution they had yet felt. This was 
due partly to nervous excitement of the whole popula- 
tion, partly to the advance towards power of the Puri- 
tans, always the war party. 

Even in the first years of the great queen there had Puritans 
been a number of Calvinists who looked askance at the 
Anglican settlement as too much of a compromise with 
Catholicism and Luthcranism. The Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles passed Convocation by a single vote as against a 1563 
more Calvinistic confession. Low-churchmen (as they 
would now be called) attacked the **Aaronic" vest- 



344 ENGLAND 

ments of the Anglican priests, and prelacy was de- 
tested as but one degree removed from papacy. 

The Puritans were not dissenters but were a party 
in the Anglican communion thoroughly believing in a 
national church, but wishing to make the breach with 
Eome as wide as possible. They found fault with all 
that had been retained in the Prayer Book for which 
there was no direct warrant in Scripture, and many of 
them began to use, in secret conventicles, the Genevan 
instead of the English liturgy. Their leader, Thomas 
Cartwright, Cartwright, a professor of divinity at Cambridge until 
deprived of his chair by the government, had brought 
back from the Netherlands ideals of a presbyterian 
form of ecclesiastical polity. In his view many ** Pop- 
ish Abuses" remained in the church of England, 
among them the keeping of saints' days, kneeling at 
communion, "the childish and superstitious toys" con- 
nected with the baptismal service, the words then used 
in the marriage service by the man, ''with my body I 
thee worship" by which the husband ''made an idol 
of his wife, ' ' the use of such titles as archbishop, arch- 
deacon, lord bishop. 

It was because of their excessively scrupulous con- 
science in these matters, that the name "Puritan" was 
given to the Calvinist by his enemy, at first a mocking 
designation analogous to "Catharus" in the Middle 
Ages. But the tide set strongly in the Puritan direc- 
tion. Time and again the Commons tried to initiate 
legislation to relieve the consciences of the stricter 
party, but their efforts were blocked by the crown. 
From this time forth the church of England made an 
alliance with the throne that has never been broken. 
As Jewel had been compelled, at the beginning of 
Elizabeth's reign, to defend the Anglican church 
against Eome, so Eichard Hooker, in his famous Ec- 



1562 



THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT 345 

clesiastical Polity was now forced to defend it from the 1594 
extreme Protestants. In the very year in which this 
finely tempered work was written, a Jesuit reported 
that the Puritans were the strongest body in the king- 
dom and particularly that they had the most officers 
and soldiers on their side. The coming Commonwealth 
was already casting its shadow on the age of 'Shake- 
speare. 

As a moral and religious influence Puritanism was 
of the utmost importance in moulding the English — 
and American — character and it was, take it all in all, 
a noble thing. If it has been justly blamed for a cer- 
tain narrowness in its hostility, or indifference, to art 
and refinement, it more than compensated for this by 
the moral earnestness that it impressed on the people. 
To bring the genius of the Bible into English life and 
literature, to impress each man with the idea of living 
for duty, to reduce politics and the whole life of the 
state to ethical standards, are undoubted services of 
Puritanism. Politically, it favored the growth of self- 
reliance, self-control and a sense of -personal worth that 
made democracy possible and necessaiy. 

To the left of the Puritans were the Independents Browne, 
or Brownists as they were called from their leader 1^339" 
Robert Browne, the advocate of Reformation ivithout 
Tarrying for Any. He had been a refugee in the 
Netherlands, where he may have come under Anabap- 
tist influence. His disciples differed from the follow- 
ers of Cartwright in separating themselves from the 
state church, in which they found many ''filthy tradi- 
tions and inventions of men." Beginning to organize 
in separate congregations about 1567, they were said 
by Sir Walter Raleigh to have as many as 20,000 ad- 
herents in 1593. Though heartily disliked by re-ac- 
tionaries and by the heati possidentes in both church 



346 ENGLAND 

and state, they were, uevertlieless, the party of the 
future. 

§ 5. IeeLlVxd 

If the union of EngUmd and Wales has been a mar- 
riage — after a courtship of the primitive type; if the 
union with Scothmd has been a successful partnership 
— following a long period of cut-throat competition; 
the position of Ireland has been that of a captive and 
a slave. To her unwilling mind the English domina- 
tion has always been a foreign one, and this fact makes 
more dilTerence with her than whether her master has 
been ci-uel, as formerly, or kind, as of late. 
English rule rp^^^, saddcst pcriod in all Erin's sad life was that of 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when to the 
old antagonism of race was added a new hatred of 
creed and a new commercial competition. The policy 
of Henry was '"to reduce that realm to the knowledge 
of God and obedience of Us." The policy of Elizabeth 
was to pray that God might "call them to the knowl- 
edge of his truth and to a civil polity," and to assist 
the Almighty by the most fiendish means to accomplish 
these ends. The government of the island was a crime, 
and yet for this crime some considerations must be 
urged in extenuation. England then regarded the 
Irish much as the Americans have seemed to regard 
the Indians, as savages to be killed and driven off to 
make room for a higher civilization. Had England 
been able to apply the method of extermination she 
would doubtless have done so and there would then be 
no Irish question today. But in 1540 it was«recognized 
that "to enterprise the whole extirpation and total de- 
struction of all the Irishmen in the land would be a 
marvellous sumptions charge and great dit^culty." 
Being unable to accomplish tliis or to put Ireland at 



mjsery 



IRELAND 347 

the bottom of the sea, where Elizabeth's minister Wals- 
ingham often wished that it were, the English had the 
alternatives of half governing or wholly abandoning 
their neighbors. The latter course was felt to be too 
dangerous, but had it been adopted, Ireland might have 
evolved an adequate government and prosperity of her 
own. It is true that she was more backward than Eng- 
land, but yet she had a considerable trade and cul- 
ture. Certain points, like Dublin and Waterford, had ^i^^ 
much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as 
to the nation as a whole, the report of 1515 prob- 
ably speaks true in saying: ''There is no common 
folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly de- 
spised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under 
foot, as the king's poor common folk of Ireland." 
There was no map of the whole of Ireland; the roads 
were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed 
as to the shape, size and population of the country. 
The most civilized part was the English Pale around 
Dublin ; the native Irish lived ''west of the Barrow and 
west of the law," and w^ere governed by more than 
sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and 
natives was forbidden by law. The only way the 
Tudor government knew of asserting its suzerainty 
over these septs, correctly described as "the king's 
Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, 
robbing and raping as they went. It was after one of 
these raids in 1580 that the poet Spencer wrote : 

The people were brought to such wretchedness that any 
strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every 
corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth 
upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them. 
They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like 
ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead 
carrions, happy where they could find them ; yea and one 



348 ENGLAND 

another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they 

spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they 

found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they 
thronged as to a feast for a time. 

The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kind- 
ness or force. Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles 
of ^^earl" and ^^lord" among the O's and Macs of her 
western island, only to find that the coronet made not 
the slightest difference in either their affections or 
their manners. They still lived as marauding chiefs, 
surrounded by wild kerns and gallowglasses fighting 
each other and preying on their own poor subjects. 
*'Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of 
them, Neil Garv, *'I pass not a pin. ... I will punish, 
exact, cut and hang where and whenever I list. ' ' Had 
they been able to make common cause they might per- 
haps have shaken the English grasp from their necks, 
for it was commonly corrupt and feeble. Sir Heniy 
Sidney was the strongest and best governor sent to the 
island during the century, but he was able to do little. 
Though the others could be bribed and though one of 
them, the Earl of Essex, conspired with the chiefs to 
rebel, and though at the very end of Elizabeth's reign 
a capable Spanish army landed in Ireland to help the 
natives, nothing ever enabled them to turn out the 
hated "Sassenach." 
English col- England had already tried to solve the Irish problem 
by colonization. Leinster had long been a center of 
English settlement, and in 1573 the first English colony 
was sent to Ulster. But as it consisted chiefly of 
bankrupts, fugitives from justice and others "of so 
corrupt a disposition as England rather refuseth," it 
did not help matters much but rather "irrecuperably 
damnified the state. ' ' The Irish Parliament continued 
to represent only the English of the Pale and of a few 
towns outside of it. Though the inhabitants of the 



onization 



IRELAND 349 

Pale remained nominally Catholic, the Parliament was 
so servile that in 1541 it destroyed the monasteries and 
repudiated the pope, shortly after which the king took Religion 
the title of Head of the Irish Church. Not one penny 
of the confiscated wealth went to endow an Irish uni- 
versity until 1591, when Trinity College was founded 
in the interests of Protestantism. Though almost 
every other country of Europe had its own printing 
presses before 1500, Ireland had none until 1551, and 
then the press was used so exclusively for propaganda 
that it made the very name of reading hateful to the 
natives. There were, however, no religious massacres 
and no martyrs of either cause. The persecuting laws 
were left until the following century. 

The rise of the traders to political power was more Commercial 
ominous than the inception of a new religion. The 
country was drained of treasure by the exaction of 
enormous ransoms for captured chiefs. The Irish 
cloth-trade and sea-borne commerce were suppressed. 
The country was flooded with inferior coin, thus put- 
ting its merchants at a vast disadvantage. Finally, 
there was little left that the Irish were able to import 
save liquors, and those ''much corrupted." 

With every plea in mitigation of judgment that can 
be offered, it must be recognized that England's gov- 
ernment of Ireland proved a failure. If she did not 
make the Irish savage she did her best to keep them so, 
and then punished them for it. By exploiting Erin's 
resources she impoverished herself. By trying to im- 
pose Protestantism she made Ireland the very strong- 
hold of papacy. By striving to destroy the septs she 
created the nation. 



exploitation 



CHAPTER VII 
SCOTLAND 

One of the most important effects of modern means 
of easy communication between all parts of the world 
has been to obliterate or minimize distinctions in na- 
■ tional character and in degrees of civilization. The 
manner of life of England and Australia differ less 
now than the manner of life of England and Scotland 
differed in the sixteenth century. The great stream of 
culture then flowed much more strongly in the central 
than in the outlying parts of Western Europe. The 
Latin nations, Italy and France, lay nearest the heart 
of civilization. But slightly less advanced in culture 
and in the amenities of life, and superior in some re- 
spects, were the Netherlands, Switzerland, England 
and the southern and central parts of Germany. In 
partial shadow round about lay a belt of lands: 
Spain, Portugal, Northern Germany, Prussia, Poland, 
Hungary, Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland. 
Scotland Scotland, indeed, had her own universities, but her 
best scholars were often found at Paris, or in German 
or Italian academies. Scotch humanists on the con- 
tinent, the Scotch guard of the French king, and Scotch 
monasteries, such as those at Erfurt and Wiirzburg, 
raised the reputation of the country abroad rather 
than advanced its native culture. Printing was not 
introduced until 1507. Brantome in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, like Aeneas Silvius in the fifteenth, remarked the 
uncouthness of the northern kingdom. 

Most backward of all was Scotland's political de- 
velopment. No king arose strong enough to be at once 

350 



SCOTLAND 351 

the tyrant and the saviour of his countr}^; under the 
weak rule of a series of minors, regents and wanton 
women a feudal baronage with a lush growth of intes- 
tine war and crime, flourished mightily to curse the 
poor people. AVhen Sir David Lyndsay asked, Why 
are the Scots so poor? he gave the correct answer: i528 

Wanting of justice, policy and peace, 
Are cause of their unhappiness, alas ! 

Something may also be attributed to the poverty of 
the soil and the lack of important commerce or in- 
dustries. 

The policy of any small nation situated in dangerous Relations 
proximity to a larger one is almost necessarily deter- England 
mined by this fact. In order to assert her independ- 
ence Scotland was forced to make common cause A\'ith 
England's enemies. Guerrilla warfare was endemic 
on the borders, breaking out, in each generation, into 
some fiercer crisis. England, on the other hand, was 
driven to seek her own safety in the annexation of her 
small enemy, or, failing that, by keeping her as im- 
potent as possible. True to the maxims of the im- 
moral political science that has commonly passed for 
statesmanship, the Tudors consistently sought by 
every form of deliberate perfidy to foster factions in 
North Britain, to purchase traitors, to hire stabbers, 
to subsidize rebels, to breed mischief, and to waste the 
country, at opportune intervals, with armies and fleets. 
Simply to protect the independence that England de- 
nied and attacked, Scotch rulers became fast allies of 
France, to be counted on, in every war between the 
great powers, to stir up trouble in England's rear. 

On neither side was the policy one of sheer hatred. 
North and south the purpose increased throughout the 
century to unite the two countries and thus put an end 
to the perennial ^nd noxious war, If the early Tudors 



352 SCOTLAND 

were mistaken in thinking they could assert a suze- 
rainty by force of arms, they also must be credited with 
laying the foundations of the future dynastic union. 
Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII 's sister, was married to 
James IV of Scotland. Somerset hoped to effect the 
union more directly by the marriage of Edward VI 
and Mary Queen of Scots. That a party of enlight- 
ened statesmen in England should constantly keep the 
union in mind, is less remarkable under the circum- 
stances than that there should have been built up a 
considerable body of Scotchmen aiming at the same 
goal. Notwithstanding the vitality of patriotism and 
the tenacity with which small nations usually refuse 
to merge their own identity in a larger whole, very 
strong motives called forth the existence of an English 
party. One favorable condition was the feudal dis- 
organization of society. Faction was so common and 
so bitter that it was able to call in the national enemy 
without utterly discrediting itself. A second element 
was jealousy of France. For a time, with the French 
marriages of James V with Mary of Lorraine, a sister 
of the Duke of Guise, and of Mary Queen of Scots with 
Francis II, there seemed more danger that the little 
kingdom should become an appanage of France than 
a satellite of her southern neighbor. The licentious- 
ness of French officers and French soldiers on Scotch 
soil made their nation least loved when it was most 
Influence sccn. But the great influence overcoming national sen- 
o reigion timent was religion. The Reformation that brought 
not peace but a sword to so much of Europe in this 
case united instead of divided the nations. 

It is sometimes said that national character reveals 
itself in the national religion. This is true to some 
extent, but it is still more important to say that a na- 
tion 's history reveals itself in its forms of faith. 
From religious statistics of the present day one could 



SCOTLAND 353 

deduce with considerable accuracy much of the history 
of any people. 

The contrast between the churches of England and 
Scotland is the more remarkable when it is considered 
that the North of England was the stronghold of 
Catholicism, and that the Lowland Scot, next door to 
the counties of the Northern Earls who rose against 
Elizabeth, flew to the opposite extreme and embraced 
Protestantism in its most pronounced form. To say 
that Calvinism, uncompromising and bare of adorn- 
ment, appealed particularly to the dour, dry, rational- 
istic Scot, is at best but a half truth and at worst a 
begging of the question. The reasons why England 
became Anglican and Scotland Presbyterian are found 
immediately not in the diversity of national character 
but in the circumstances of their respective polities and 
history. England cast loose from Rome at a time 
when the conservative influence of Luther was pre- 
dominant ; Scotland was swept into the current of rev- 
olution under the fiercer star of Calvin. The English 
Eeformation was started by the crown and supported 
by the new noblesse of commerce. The Scotch revolu- 
tion Avas markedly baronial in tone. It began with the 
humanists, continued and flourished in the junior 
branches of great families, among the burgesses of the 
towns and among the more vigorous of the clergy, both 
regular and secular. The crown was consistently 
against the new movement, but the Scottish monarch 
was too weak to impose his will, or even to have a will 
of his owm. Neither James V nor his daughter could 
afford to break with Rome and with France. James 
V, especially, was thrown into the arms of his clergy 
by the hostility of his nobles. Moreover, after the 
death of manj^ nobles at the battle of Flodden, the 
clergy became, for a time, the strongest estate in the 1513 
kingdom. 



354 



SCOTLAND 



Reforma- 
tion 



February 
29, 1528 



Like the other estates the clergy were still in the 
Middle Ages when the Reformation came on them like 
a thief in the night. In no country was the corruption 
greater. The bishops and priests took concubines and 
ate and drank and were drunken and buffeted their fel- 
low men. They exacted their fees to the last farthing, 
an especially odious one being the claim of the priest 
to the best cow on the death of a parishioner. As a 
consequence the parsons and monks were hated by the 
laity. 

Humanism shed a few bright beams on the hyper- 
borean regions of Dundee and Glasgow. Some Eras- 
mians, like Hector Boece, prepared others for the Ref- 
ormation without joining it themselves; some, like 
George Buchanan, threw genius and learning into the 
scales of the new faith. The unlearned, too, were 
touched with reforming zeal. Lollardy sowed a few 
seeds of heresy. About 1520 Wyclif 's version of the 
New Testament was turned into Scots by one John 
Nesbit, but it remained in manuscript. 

In the days before newspapers tidings were carried 
from place to place by wandering merchants and itiner- 
ant scholars. Far more than today propaganda was 
dependent on personal intercourse. One of the first 
preachers of Lutheranism in Scotland was a French- 
man named La Tour, who was martyred on his return 
to his own country. The noble Patrick Hamilton made 
a pilgrimage to the newly founded University of Mar- 
burg, and possibly to Wittenberg. Filled, as his Cath- 
olic countryman. Bishop John Leslie put it, ''with 
venom very poisonable and deadly . . . soaked out of 
Luther and other archheretics, " he returned to find 
the martyr's crown in his native land. "The reek of 
Patrick Hamilton" infected all upon whom it blew. 
Other young men visited Germany. Some, like Alex- 
ander Alesius and John MacAlpine, found positions in 



SCOTLAND 



355 



July 17, 
1525 



February 
20, 1527 



foreign universities. Others visited Wittenberg for a 
short time to carry thence the new gospel. A Scotch 
David ^ appears at Wittenberg in January 1528. An- 
other Scot, ''honorably born and well seen in scholas- 
tic theology, exiled from his land on account of the 
Word," made Luther's acquaintance in May, 1529. 
Another of the Reformer's visitors was James Wed- 
derburn whose brother, John, translated some of the 1540-2 
German's hymns, and published them as ''Ane com- 
pendious Booke of Godly and spiritual Songs." 

AVhile men like these were bringing tidings of the 
new faith back to their countr;}Tnen, others were busy 
importing and distributing Lutheran books. The Par- 
liament prohibited all works of "the heretic Luther and 
his disciples," but it could not enforce this law. The 
English agent at Antwerp reported to Wolsey that 
New Testaments and other English works were bought 
by Scottish merchants and sent to Edinburgh and St. 
Andrews. The popularity and influence of Tyndale's 
and Coverdale 's Bible is proved by the rapid angliciz- 
ing, from this date onward, of the Scots dialect. The 
circulation of the Scriptures in English is further 
proved by the repetition of the injunctions against 
using them. But the first Bible printed in Scotland 
was that of Alexander Arbuthnot in 1579, based on the 
Geneva Bible in 1561. 

Another indication of the growth of Lutheranism is 
the request of King James V to Consistory for per- 
mission to tax his clergy one-third of their revenues 
in order to raise an army against the swarm of his 
Lutheran subjects. As these Protestants met in pri- 
vate houses, Parliament passed a law, ' ' That none hold 
nor let be liolden in their houses nor other ways, con- 
gregations or conventicles to commune or dispute of 

1 Could he have been David Borthwick or David Lyndsay ? See 
Luther's letters and Dictionary of Xational Biography. 



March 14, 
1531 



1540 



356 



SCOTLAND 



the Holy Scripture, without they be theologians ap- 
proved by famous universities." 

As the new party grew the battle was joined. At 

ramplilets least twelve martyrs perished in the years 1539-40. 
The field was taken on either side by an army of pam- 
phlets, ballads and broadsides, of which the best 
known, perhaps, is David Lyndsay's xine Satire of the 
thrie Estatis. In this the clergy are mercilessly at- 

1540 tacked for greed and wantonness. The New Testa- 

ment is highly praised by some of the characters in- 
troduced into the poem, but a pardoner complains that 
his credit has been entirely destroyed by it and wishes 
the devil ma^^ take him who made that book. He fur- 
ther wishes that ''^Martin Luther, that false loon, Black 
Bullinger and Melanchthon" had been smothered in 
their chrisom-cloths and that St. Paul had never been 
born. 



Mary 
Stuart, 
born Dec. 
8, 1542 



Cardinal 
Beaton 



When James V died, he left the cro-\vii to his infant 
daughter of six days old, that Mary whose beauty, 
crimes and tragic end fixed the attention of her con- 
temporaries and of posterity alike. For the first 
three years of her reign the most powerful man in 
-the kingdom was David Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop 
of St. Andrews. His policy, of course, was to main- 
tain the Catholic religion, and this implied the defence 
of Scotch independence against England. Henry VIII, 
with characteristic lack of scruple, plotted to kidnap 
the infant queen and either to kidnap or to assassinate 
the cardinal. Failing in both, he sent an army north 
with orders to put man, woman and child to the sword 
wherever resistance was made. Edinburgh castle re- 
mained untaken, but Holyrood was burned and the 
country devastated as far as Sterling. 

Defeated by England, Beaton was destined to per- 



SCOTLAND 357 

ish in conflict with his other enemy, Protestantism. 
During this time of transition from Luthcranism to 
Calvinism, the demands of the Scotch reformers would 
have been more moderate than they later became. 
They would doubtless have been content with a free 
Bible, free preaching and the sequestration of the 
goods of the religious orders. Under George Wishart, 
who translated the First Helvetic Confession, the Kirk ^^-^^^^ 
began to assume its Calvinistic garb and to take the 
aspect of a party with a definite political program. 
The place of newspapers, both as purveyors of infor- 
mation and as organs of public opinion, was taken by 
the sermons of the ministers, most of them political 
and all of them controversial. Of this party Beaton 
was the scourge. He himself believed that in 15-45 he- 
resy Avas almost extinct, and doubtless his belief was 
confirmed when he was able to put Wishart to death. 1545 
In revenge for this a few fanatics murdered him. May 29 

in the consummation of the religious revolution John Knox 
during the next quarter of a century, one factor was 
the personality of John Knox. A born partisan, a man 
of one idea who could see no evil on his own side and 
no good on the other, as a good fighter and a good 
hater he has had few equals. His supreme devotion 
to the cause he embraced made him credulous of evil 
in his foes, and capable of using deceit and of applaud- 
ing political murder. Of his first preaching against 
Romanism it was said, ''Other have sned [snipped] 
the branches, but this man strikes at the root," and 
well nigh the latest judgment passed upon him, that 
of Lord Acton, is that he differed from all other Prot- 
estant founders in his desire that the Catholics should 
be exterminated, either by the state or by the self- 
help of all Christian men. His not to speak the words 
of love and mercy from the gospel, but to curse and 



358 SCOTLAND 

thunder against ''those dumb dogs, the poisoned and 
pestilent papists" in the style of the Old Testament 
prophet or psalmist. But while the harshness of his 
character has repelled many, his fundamental consist- 
ency and his courage have won admiration. As a 
great preacher, "or he had done with his sermon he 
was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding 
the pulpit in blads and fly out of it." His style was 
direct, vigorous, plain, full of pungent wit and biting 
sarcasm. 

Even the year of his birth is in dispute. The tra- 
ditional date is 1505 ; but it has been showai with much 
reason that the more likely date is 1513 or 1514. That 
he had a university education and that he was or- 
dained priest is all that is known of him until about 
1540. During the last months of Wishart's life Knox 
was his constant attendant. His o^vn preaching con- 
tinued the work of the martyr until June, 1547, when 
^ St. Andrews was captured by the French fleet and 
/ Knox was made a galley slave for nineteen months. 
Under the lash and, what grieved him even more, con- 
stantly plied with suggestions that he should ' ' commit 
idolatry" in praying to the image of Mary, his heart 
grew bitter against the French and their religion. 
Released, either through the influence of the Eng- 

1549^^^' lish government, or by an exchange of prisoners, Knox 
spent the next five years in England. After filling 

1551 positions as preacher at Berwick and Newcastle, he 

Avas appointed royal chaplain and was offered the 
bishopric of Rochester, which he declined because he 
foresaw the troubles under Mary. As the pioneer of 
Puritanism in England he used his influence to make 
the Book of Common Prayer more Protestant. Not 
long after Mary's accession Knox fled to the Con- 
tinent, spending a few years at Frankfort and Geneva. 
He was much impressed by ''that notable servant of 



SCOTLAND 359 

God, John Calvin" whose system he adopted with 
political modifications of his own. .., 

In the meantime things were not going well in Scot- 
land. The country had suffered another severe defeat September 
at the hands of the English in the battle of Pinkie. 
The government was largely in the hands of the Queen 
Dowager, Mary of Lorraine, who naturally favored 
France, and who married her daughter, the Queen of 
Scots, to the Dauphin Francis, both of them being April 24, 
fifteen years old. By treaty she conveyed Scotland ^^^ 
to the king of France, acting on the good old theory 
that her people were a chattel. Though the pact, with 
its treason to the people, was secret, its purport was 
guessed by all. Whereas the accession of Francis II __ 
momentarily bound Scotland closer to France, his 
death in the following year again cut her loose, and al- 
lowed her to go her own way. 

All the while the Eeformed party had been slowly 
growing in strength. Somerset took care to send 
plenty of English Bibles across the Cheviot Hill, 
rightly seeing in them the best emissaries of the Eng- 
lish interest. The Scotch were dra^\m towards Eng- 
land by the mildness of her government as much as 
they were alienated from France by the ferocity of 
hers. In Scotland the English party, when it had the 
chance, made no Catholic martyrs, but the French party 
continued to put heretics to death. The execution of 1558 
the aged Walter Milne, the last of the victims of the 
Catholic persecution, excited especial resentment. 

Knox now returned to his o^\'ll country for a short ^nox, 
visit. He there preached passionately against the August, 
mass and addressed a letter to the Regent Mary of 
Lorraine, begging her to favor the gospel. This she 
treated as a joke, and, after Knox had departed, she 
sentenced him to death and burnt him in effigy. From 
Geneva he continued to be the chief adviser of the 



1558 



360 SCOTLAND 

December Protestant party, whose leaders drew up a ' * Common 
Band," usually known as the First Scottish Covenant. 
The signers, including a large number of nobles and 
gentlemen headed by the earls of Argyle, Glencaim 
and Morton, promised to apply their whole power, 
substance and lives to maintain, set forward and estab- 
lish *'the most blessed Word of God and his congre- 
gation. ' ' Under the protection of this bond, reformed 
churches were set up openly. The Lords of the Con- 
gregation, as they were called, demanded that penal 
statutes against heretics be abrogated and "that it 
be lawful to us to use ourselves in matters of religion 
and conscience as we must answer to God." This 
scheme of toleration was too advanced for the time. 

1557 As the assistance of Knox was felt to be desirable, 

the Lords of the Congregation urgently requested his 
return. Before doing so he published his "Appella- 

May2, tion" to the nobles, estates and commonalty against 
the sentence of death recently passed on him. When 
he did arrive in Edinburgh, his preaching was like a 
match set to kindling wood. Wherever he went burst 
forth the flame of iconoclasm. Lnages w^ere broken 
and monasteries stormed not, as he himself wrote, by 
gentlemen or by ''earnest professors of Christ," but 
by "the rascal multitude." In reckoning the forces 
of revolution, the jo}^ of the mob in looting must not 

May 11 -^Q forgotten. From Perth Knox wrote: "The places 
of idolatry were made equal with the ground ; all mon- 
uments of idolatry that could be apprehended, con- 
sumed with fire; and priests commanded, under pain 
of death, to desist from their blasphemous mass." 
Similar outbursts occurred at St. Andrews, and when 
Knox returned to Edinburgh, civil war seemed im- 
minent. Pamphlets of the time, like The Beggars' 

1559 ^' Warning, distinctly made the threat of social revolu- 
tion. 



SCOTLAND 361 

But as a matter of fact the change came as the most 
bloodless in Europe. The Reformers, popular with the 
middle and with part of the upper classes, needed only 
to win English support to make themselves perfectly 
secure. The difficulty in this course lay in Queen 
Elizabeth's natural dislike of Knox on account of his 
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous 
Regiment of Women. In this war-whoop, aimed 
against the Marys of England and Scotland, Knox had 
argued that 'Ho promote a woman to bear rule, super- 
iority, dominion or empire above any realm is repug- 
nant to nature, contrary to God, and, finally, it is the 
subversion of good order and of all equity and justice." 
The author felt not a little embarrassment when a 
Protestant woman ascended the throne of England 
and he needed her help. But to save his soul he ''that 
never feared nor flattered any flesh" could not admit 
that he was in the wrong, nor take back aught that he 
had said. He seems to have acted on Barry Lyn- 
don 's maxim that ' ' a gentleman fights but never apol- 
ogizes." When he wrote Elizabeth, all he would say July 20, 

1559 

was that he was not her enemy and had never offended 
her or her realm maliciously or of purijose. He sea- 
soned this attempt at reconciliation by adding a sting- 
ing rebuke to the proud 5^oung queen for ha\dng ''de- 
clined from God and bowed to idolatry," during her 
sister's reign, for fear of her life. 

But the advantages of union outweighed such minor 
considerations as bad manners, and early in 1560 a 
league was formed between England and the Lords of 
the Congregation. Shortly after the death of Mary June 11, 
of Lorraine the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed be- Treaty of 
tween the queen of England and the lords of Scot- Edinburgh, 
land. This provided: (1) that all English and French "^"'^^ 
troops be sent out of Scotland except 120 French; 
(2) that all warlike preparations cease; (3) that the 



362 



SCOTLAND 



Revolution 



Scottish 
Confessioi^'^ 



Berwickshire citadel of the sea, Eyemouth, be disman- 
tled; (4) that Mary and Francis should disuse the Eng- 
lish title and arms; (5) that Philip of Spain should 
arbitrate certain points, if necessary; (6) that Eliza- 
beth had not acted wrongfully in making a league with 
the Lords of the Congregation. Mary and Francis 
refused to ratify this treaty. 

A supplementary agreement was proposed between 
Mary Stuart and her rebellious Protestant subjects. 
She promised to summon Parliament at once, to make 
neither war nor peace without the consent of the es- 
tates, and to govern according to the advice of a coun- 
cil of twelve chosen jointly by herself and the estates. 
She promised to give no high offices to strangers or to 
clergymen ; and she extended to all a general amnesty. 

The summons of Parliament immediately after these 
negotiations proved as disastrous to the old regime 
as the assembly of the French Estates General in 1789. 
Though bloodless, the Scotch revolution was as thor- 
ough, in its o^vn small way, as that of Robespierre. 
Religion was changed and a new distribution of po- 
litical power secured, transferring the ascendency of 
the crown and of the old privileged orders to a class 
of ''new men,'^ low-bom ministers of the kirk, small 
''lairds'' and burgesses. The very constitution of 
-the new Parliament was revolutionary. In the old 
legislative assemblies between ten and twenty greater 
barons were summoned; in the Parliament of 1560 no 
less than 106 small barons assembled, and it was to 
them, together with the burgesses of the cities, that 
the adoption of the new religion was due. A Confes- 
sion of Faith, on extreme Calvinistic lines, had been 
drawn up by Knox and his fellows ; this was presented 
to Parliament and adopted with only eight dissenting 
voices, those of five laymen and three bishops. The 
minority was overawed^ not only by the majority in 



the estates 



SCOTLAND 363 

Parliament but by the public opinion of the capital 
and of the whole Lowlands, 

Just a week after the adoption of the Confession, the Laws of 
estates passed three laws: (1) Abolishing the pope's 
authority and all jurisdiction by Catholic prelates; 
(2) repealing all previous statutes in favor of the Ro- 
man church; (3) forbidding the celebration of mass. 
The law calls it 'Svicked idolatry" and provides that 
''no manner of person nor persons say mass, nor yet 
hear mass, nor be present thereat under pain of con- 
fiscation of all their goods movable and immovable and 
punishing their bodies at the discretion of the magis- 
trate." The penalty for the third offence was made 
death, and all officers were commanded to ''take dili- 
gent suit and inquisition" to prevent the celebration 
of the Catholic rite. In reality, persecution was ex- 
tremely mild, simply because there w^as hardly any 
resistance. Scarcely three Catholic martyrs can be 
named, and there was no Pilgrimage of Grace. This 
is all the more remarkable in that probably three- 
fourths of the people were still Catholic. The Refor- 
mation, like most other revolutions, was the work not 
of the majority, but of that part of the people that 
had the energy and intelligence to see most clearly and 
act most strongly. For the first time in Scotch his- 
tory a great issue was submitted to a public opinion 
sufficiently developed to realize its importance. The 
great choice was made not by counting heads but by 
w^eighing character. 

The burgher class having seized the reins of govern- 
ment proceeded to use them in the interests of their 
kirk. The prime duty of the state was asserted to be 
the maintenance of the true religion. Ministers were 
paid by the government. Almost any act of govern- 
ment might be made the subject of interference by the 
church, for Knox's profession, "with the policy, mind 



364 SCOTLAND 

us to meddle no further than it hath religion mixed 
in it," was obviously an elastic and self-imposed limi- 
tation. 

Theocracy The character of the kirk was that of a democratic, 
puritanical theocracy. The real rulers of it, and 
through it of the state, were th6 ministers and elders 
elected by the people. The democracy of the kirk con- 
sisted in the rise of most of these men from the lower 
ranks of the people; its theocracy in the claim of these 
men, once established in Moses' seat, to interpret the 
commands of God. '*I see," said Queen Mary, after 
a conversation with Knox, ''that my subjects shall 
obey you rather than me." "Madam," replied Knox, 
**my study is that both princes and people shall obey 
God" — but, of course, the voice of the pulpit was the 
voice of God. As a contemporary put it: ''Knox is 
king; what he wills obey it is." Finally the kirk was 
a tyranny, as a democracy may well be. In life, in 
manners, in thought, the citizen was obliged, under 
severe social penalty, to conform exactly to a very 
narrow standard. 

Queen "When Quecu ]\Iarv, a widow eighteen vears old, 

Mary in r' . 7 

Scotland, landed in Scotland, she must have been aware of the 
Auf;usti9, thorny path she was to tread. It is impossible not to 
pity her, the spoiled darling of the gayest court of 
Europe, exposed to the bleak skies and bleaker winds 
of doctrines at Edinburgh. Endowed with high spirit, 
courage, no little cleverness and nmch charm, she 
might have mastered the situation had her character 
or discretion equaled her intellect and beauty. But, 
thwarted, nagged and bullied by men whose religion 
she hated, whose power she feared and whose low birth 
she despised, she became more and more reckless in 
the pursuit of pleasure until she was tangled in a net- 
work of vice and crime, and delivered helpless into the 
hands of her enemies. 



SCOTLAND 



165 



Her true policy, and the one which she began to fol- 
low, was marked out for her by circumstances. Scot- 
land was to her but the stepping-stone to the throne 
of England. As Elizabeth's next heir she might be- 
come queen either through the death of the reigning 
sovereign, or as the head of a Catholic rebellion. At 
first she prudently decided to wait for the natural 
course of events, selecting as her secretary" of state 
Maitland, **the Scottish Cecil," a staid politician bent 
on keeping friends with England. But at last growing 
impatient, she compromised herself in the Catholic 
plots and risings of the disaffected southerners. 

So, while aspiring to three crowns, Mary showed 
herself incapable of keeping even the one she had. 
Not religion but her own crimes and follies caused 
her downfall, but it was over religion that the first 
clash with her subjects came. She would have liked 
to restore Catholicism, though this was not her first 
object, for she would have been content to be left in 
the private enjoyment of her o\vn worship. Even on 
this the stalwarts of the kirk looked askance. Knox 
preached as Mary landed that one mass was more ter- 
rible to him than ten thousand armed invaders. Marj- 
sent for him, hoping to win the hard man by a display 
of feminine and queenly graciousness. In all he had 
five interviews with her, picturesquely described by 
himself. On his side there were long, stern sermons 
on the duties of princes and the wickedness of idolatry, 
all richly illustrated with examples drawn from the 
sacred page. On her side there was ''howling to- 
gether with womanly weeping," ''more howling and 
tears above that the matter did require," "so many 
tears that her chamber-boy could scarce get napkins 
enough to dry her eyes." With absurdly unconscious 
offensiveness and egotism Knox began acquaintance 
with his sovereign by remarking that he was as well 



August, 
1561- 
December, 
1563 



366 



SCOTLAND 



Marriage 
with 
Darnley, 
July, 1565 



March 9, 
1566 



content to live under her as Paul under Nero. Pre- 
viously he had maintained that the government was 
set up to control religion ; now he informed Mary that 
** right religion took neither original nor authority 
from worldly princes but from the Eternal God alone." 
^* 'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects, having power, 
may resist their princes?' 'If princes exceed their 
bounds, madam, they may be resisted and even de- 
posed,' " replied Knox. Mary's marriage was the 
most urgent immediate question of policy. When 
Knox took the liberty of discussing it with her she 
burst out : ' ' What have you to do with my marriage ? 
Or what are you within this commonwealth?" "A 
subject born within the same," superbly retorted the 
East Lothian peasant, "and though neither earl, lord 
nor baron, God has made me a profitable member." 

Determined, quite excusably, to please herself rather 
than her advisers in the choice of a husband, Mary 
selected her cousin Henry Stuart Lord Darnley; a 
"long lad" not yet twenty. The marriage was cele- 
brated in July, 1565 ; the necessary papal dispensation 
therefor was actually drawn up on September 25 but 
was thoughtfully provided with a false date as of 
four months earlier. Almost from the first the mar- 
riage was wretchedly unhappy. The petulant boy in- 
sisted on being treated as king, whereas Mary allowed 
him only "his due." Darnley was jealous, probably 
with good cause, of his wife 's Italian secretary, David 
Riccio, and murdered him in Mary's presence; "an 
action worthy of all praise," pontificated Knox. 

With this crime begins in earnest that sickening tale 
of court intrigue and blackest villainy that has com- 
monly passed as the then history of Scotland. To re- 
venge her beloved secretary Mary plotted with a new 
paramour, the Earl of Bothwell, an able soldier, a 



SCOTLAND 367 

nominal Protestant and an evil liver. On the night of 
February 9-10, 1567, the house of Kirk o' Field near 
Edinburgh where Darnley was staying and where his 
wife had but just left him, was blown up by gunpowder 
and later his dead body was found near by. Public ^ 
opinion at once laid the crime at the right doors, and it Marriage 
did not need Mary's hasty marriage with Bothwell JJJ^jj^ jJJ^y 
to confirm the suspicion of her complicity. 15, 1567 

The path of those opposed to the queen was made James vi, 
easier by the fact that she now had an heir, James, i^| ' 
of Scotland the sixth and afterwards of England the 
first. The temper of the people of Edinburgh was 
indicated by the posting up of numerous placards 
accusing Bothwell and Mary. One of these was a 
banner on which was painted a little boy kneeling and 
crowned, and thereon the legend: '^Avenge the death 
of my father!" Deeds followed words; Parliament July 16 
compelled the queen under threat of death to abdicate 
in favor of her son and to appoint her half-brother, 
the Earl of Moray, regent. At the coronation of the July 29 
infant king Knox preached. A still more drastic step 
was taken when Parliament declared Mary guilty of December 
murder and formally deposed her from the throne. 
That Mary really w^as guilty in the fullest degree there 
can be no reasonable doubt. An element of mystery 
has been added to the situation by a dispute over the 
genuineness of a series of letters and poems purport- 
ing to have been written by Mary to Bothwell and y- 
known collectively as the Casket Letters. They were 
discovered in a suspiciously opportune way by her 
enemies. The originals not being extant, some his- 
torians have regarded them in whole or in part as 
forgeries, but Robertson, Ranke, Froude, Andrew 
Lang and Pollard accept them as genuine. This is mj^ 
opinion, but it seems to me that the fascination of 



368 SCOTLAND 

mystery has lent the documents undue importance. 
Had they never been found Mary's guilt would have 
been established by circumstantial evidence. 

Mary was confined for a short time in the castle of 
Lochleven, but contrived to escape. As she ap- 
May,i568 proached Glasgow she risked a battle, but her troops 
w^ere defeated and she fled to England. Throwing 
herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and 
finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry 
was held concerning her case, but no verdict was ren- 
dered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her 
sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for 
the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a 
' plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned 
to die. In spite of the fact that she did everything 
possible to disgrace herself more deeply than ever, such 
as pensioning the assassin of her brother Moray, her 
sufferings made her the martyr of sentimentalists^ 
and pieces of embroidery or other possessions of the 
beautiful queen have been handed down as the precious 
relics of a saint.^ 

All the murderous intrigues just narrated contrib- 
uted thoroughly to disgrace the Catholic and royalist 
party. The revolution had left society dissolved, full 
of bloodthirsty and false men. But though the Prot- 
estants had their share of such villains, they also had 
the one consistent and public-spirited element in the 
kingdom, namely Knox and his immediate followers. 
Moray w^as a man rather above the average respecta- 
bility and he confirmed the triumph of Protestantism 
in the Lowlands in the few short years preceding his 
assassination in January, 1570. But by this time the 
revolution had been so firmly accomplished that noth- 
ing could shake it. The deposition of a queen, though 

1 Such a piece of embroidery liaa been kept in my mother's family 
from that day to this, 



SCOTLAND 369 

a defiance of all the Catholic powers and of all the 
royalist sentiment of Europe, had succeeded. The 
young king was brought up a Protestant, and his mind 
was so thoroughly turned against his mother that he 
acquiesced without a murmur in her execution. At 
last peace and security smiled upon North Britain. J^^imSn"" 
The coming event of the union with England cast its with 
beneficent shadow over the reign of Elizabeth's sue- England 
cessor. 

The Reformation ran the same course as in Eng- Absolution 
land earlier; one is almost tempted to hypostatize it 
and say that it took the bit between its teeth and ran 
away with its riders. Actually, the man cast for the 
role of Henry VIII was James VI; the slobbering 
pedant without drawing the sword did what his abler 
ancestors could not do after a life-time of battle. He 
made himself all but absolute, and this, demonstrably, 
as head of the kirk. 

In 1584 Parliament passed a series of statutes kno^vn 
as the Black Acts, putting the bodies and souls of the 
Scotch under the yoke of the king, who was now j)ope 
as well. In 1587 the whole property of the pre-Refor- 
mation church, with some trifling exceptions, was con- 
fiscated and put at the king's disposition. As in Eng- 
land, so here, the lands of abbeys and of prelates was 
thro^vn to new men of the pushing, commercial type. 
Thus was founded a landed aristocracy with interests 
distinct from the old barons and strong in supporting 
both king and Reformation. 

It is true that this condition was but temporary. Reaction in 
Just as in England later the Parliament and the Puri- I'i^i'''^''' 
tans called the crown to account, so in Scotland the 
kirk continued to administer drastic advice to the mon- 
arch and finally to put direct legal pressure upon him. 
The Black Acts were abrogated by Parliament in 1592 
and from that time forth ensued a struggle between the 



1592 



370 SCOTLAND 

king and the presbyteries which, in the opinion of the 
former, agreed as well together as God and the devil. 
Still more after his accession to the English throne 
James came to prefer the episcopal form of church 
government as more subservient, and to act on the 
maxim, '*no bishop, no king." 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

§ 1. Itax.y 

It is sometimes so easy to see, after the event, why 
things should have taken just the course they did 
take, that it may seem remarkable that political fore- 
sight is so rare. It is probable, however, that the 
study of history not only illumines many things, and 
places them in their true perspective, but also tends to 
simplify too much, overemphasizing, to our minds, the 
elements that finally triumphed and casting those that 
succumbed into the shadow. 

However this may be, Italy of the sixteenth century Italy 
appears to offer an unusually clear case of a logical 
sequence of effects due to previously ascertainable 
causes. That Italj^ should toy with the Reformation 
without accepting it, that she should finally suppress 
it and along with it much of her owii spiritual life, 
seems to be entirely due to her geographical, political 
and cultural condition at the time when she felt the 
impact of the new ideas. 

In all these respects, indeed, there was something 
that might at first blush have seemed favorable to the 
Lutheran revolt. Few lands were more open to Ger- 
man and Swiss influences than was their transalpine 
neighbor. Commercially, Italy and Germany were 
united by a thousand bonds, and a constant influx of 
northern travellers, students, artists, officials and sol- 
diers, might be supposed to carry with them the conta- 
gion of the new ideas. Again, the lack of political 
unity might be supposed, as in Germany, so in Italy, 

371 



372 



THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 



1525 
1529 K' 



.Hf"' 



1527 



Cosimo de' 

Medici, 

1537-74 



to facilitate sectional reformation. Finally, the Re- 
naissance, Avith its unparalleled freedom of thought and 
its strong anti-clerical bias, would at least insure a fair 
hearing for innovations in doctrine and ecclesiastical 
ideals. 

And yet, as even contemporaries saw, there were 
some things which weighed far more heavily in the 
scale of Catholicism than did those just mentioned in 
the scale of Protestantism. In the first place the au- 
tonomy of the political divisions was more apparent 
than real. Too weak and too disunited to offer re- 
sistance to any strong foreign power, contended for by 
the three greatest, Italy became gradually more and 
more a Spanish doocjndency. After Pavia and the 
treaty of Caieau-Cambresis French influence was re- 
duced to a threat rather than a reality. Naples had 
long been an appendage of the Spanish crown ; Milan 
w^as now wrested from the French, and one after an- 
other most of the smaller states passed into Spain's 
''sphere of influence." The strongest of all the states, 
the papal dominions, became in reality, if not nom- 
inally, a dependency of the emperor after the sack of 
Pome. Tuscany, Savoy and Venetia maintained a 
semblance of independence, but Savoy was at that time 
hardly Italian. Venice had passed the zenith of her 
power, and Florence, even under her brilliant Duke 
Cosimo de' Medici was amenable to the pressure of 
the Spanish soldier and the Spanish priest. 

Enormous odds were thrown against the Reformers 
because Italy was the seat of the papacy. In spite of 
all hatred of Roman morals and in spite of all distrust 
of Roman doctrine, this was a source of pride and of 
advantage of the whole country. As long as tribute 
flowed from all Western Europe, as long as kings and 
emperors kissed the pontiff's toe, Rome was still in a 
sense the capital of Christendom. An example of how 



ITALY 373 

the papacy was both served and despised has been left 

us by the Florentine statesman and historian Guicci- Guiccidar- 

dardini: *'So much evil cannot be said of the Roman 1483-1540 

curia," he wrote, ''that more does not deserve to be 

said of it, for it is an infamy, an example of all the 

shame and wickedness of the world." He might have 

been supposed to be ready to support any enemy of 

such an institution, but what docs he say? 

No man dislikes more than do I the ambition, avarice 
and effeminacy of the priests, not onl}^ because these 
vices are hateful in themselves but because they are 
especially unbecoming to men who have vowed a life de- 
pendent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment 
Avitli several popes has forced me to desire their greatness 
for my OAvn advantage. But for this consideration I 
should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself 
from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly under- 
stood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, 
so that they might live either without vices or without 
power. 

From this precious text we learn much of the inner 
history of contemporary Italy. As far as the Italian 
mind was liberated in religion it was atheistic, as far 
as it was reforming it went no further than rejection 
of the hierarchy. The enemies to be dreaded by Rome 
were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, not Luther ^jg™^""!: 
and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness, avarice, 
ambition, sensuality and gluttony. 

The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestant-^ 
ism in Italy was not Catholicism but the Renaissance. Renais- 
Dceply imbued witE~the tincture of classical learning, RXrma- 
natnrally speculative and tolerant, the Italian mind tion 
had already advanced, in its best representatives, far 
beyond the intellectual stage of the Reformers. The 
hostility of the Renaissance to the Reformation was a 
deep and subtle antithesis of the interests of this world 



374; 



THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 



and of the next. It is notable that whereas some philo- 
sophical minds, like that of the brilliant Olympia Mo- 
rata, who had once been completely skeptical, later 
came under the influence of Luther, there was not 
one artist of the first rank, not one of the greatest 
poets, that seems to have been in the least attracted 
by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, showed 
traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were 
bitterly hostile. The former cared only for his fan- 
tastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did 
mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar 
Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become 
an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had 
overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphys- 
ical theology, '^ because when the mind soars up to see 
God it is no wonder that it falls do^vn sometimes blind 
and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures as a 
devastating monster. 

But there was a third reason why the Reformation 
could not succeed in Italy, and that was that it could 
not catch the ear of the common people. If for the 
churchman it was a heresy, and for the free-thinker a 
superstition, for the ''general public" of ordinarily 
educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those 
who did embrace its doctrines and read its books, and 
they were not a few of the second-rate humanists, 
cherished it as their fathers had cherished the neo- 
Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric phi- 
losophy. So little inclined were they to bring their 
faith to the people that they preferred to translate 
the Bible into better Greek or classical Latin rather 
than into the vulgar Tuscan. And just at the moment 
when it seemed as if a popular movement of some sort 
might result from the efforts of the Reformers, or in 
spite of them, came the Roman Inquisition and nipped 
the budding plant. 



ITALY 375 

But between the levels of the greatest intellectual Christian 
leaders and that of the illiterate masses, there was a g^^^g 
surprising number of groups of men and women more 
or less tinctured with the doctrines of the north. And 
yet, even here, one must add that their religion was 
seldom pure Lutheranism or Calvinism; it was Chris- 
tianized humanism. There was the brilliant woman 
Vittoria Colonna, who read with rapture the doctrine 
of justification by faith, but who remained a conform- 
ing Catholic all her life. There was Ochino, the gen- ^"^ 
eral of the Capuchins, whose defection caused a panic 
at Rome but who remained, nevertheless, an independ- 
ent rather than an orthodox Protestant. Of like qual- 
ity were Peter Martyr Vermigli, an exile for his faith, 
and Jerome Bolsec, a native of France but an inhab- 
itant of Ferrara, whence he took to Geneva an eccentric 
doctrine that caused much trouble to Calvin. Finally, 
it was perfectly in accordance with the Italian genius 
that the most radical of Protestant dissenters, the 
unitarians Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, should have been 
born in Siena. 

Among the little nests of Lutherans or Christian 
mysti'cs the most important were at Venice, Ferrara 
and Naples. As early as 1519 Luther's books found 
their way to Venice, and in 1525 one of the leading 
canon la^vyers in the city wrote an elaborate refuta- 
tion of them, together with a letter to the Reformer 
himself, informing him that his act of burning the papal 
decretals was worse than that of Judas in betraying, 
or of Pilate in crucifying, Christ. The first sufferer 
for the new religion was Jerome Galateo. Never- 1530 
theless, the new church waxed strong, and many were 
executed for their opinions. A correspondence of the 
brethren with Bucer and Luther has been preserved. 
In one letter they deeply deplore the schisms on the doc- 
trine of the eucharist as hurtful to their cause. The 



376 



THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 



famous artist Lorenzo Lotto was employed to paint 
pictures of Luther and his wife, probably copies of 
Cranach. The appearance of the Socinians about 1550, 
and the mutual animosity of the several sects, includ- 
ing the Anabaptist, was destructive. Probably more 
fatal was the disaster of the Schmalkaldic war and the 
complete triumph of the emperor. The Inquisition 
finished the work of crushing out what remained of the 
new doctrines. 

That Naples became a focus of Protestantism was 
due mainly to John de Valdes, a deeply religious Span- 
iard. From his circle went out a treatise on justifica- 
tion entitled The Benefit of Christ's Death, by Benedict 
of Mantua, of which no less than 40,000 copies were 
sold, for it was the one reforming work to enjoy popu- 
larity rivalling that of Luther and Erasmus. Influ- 
enced by Valdes, also, Bartholomew Forzio translated 
Luther's Address to the German Nobility into Italian. 

At the court of Ferrara the duchess, Renee de France, 
gathered a little circle of Protestants. Calvin himself 
spent some time here, and his influence, together with 
the high protection of his patroness, made the place 
a fulcrum against Rome. Isabella d'Este, originally 
of Ferrara and later Marchioness of Mantua, one of 
the brilliant women of the Renaissance, for a while 
toyed with the fashionable theology. Cardinal Bembo 
saw at her castle at Mantua paintings of Erasmus and 
Luther. One of the courtly poets of Northern Italy, 
Francis Berni, bears witness to the good repute of the 
Protestants. In his Rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando 
Inamorato, he wrote: '^Some rascal hypocrites snarl 
between their teeth, ' Freethinker ! Lutheran ! ' but Lu- 
theran means, you know, good Christian." 

The most significant sign of the times, and the most 
ominous for the papacy, was that among those affected 
by the leaven of Lutheranism were many of the leading 



THE PAPACY 377 

luminaries in the bosom of the church. That the Flor- 
entine chronicler Bartholomew Cerratani expressed his 
hope that Luther's distinguished morals, piety and 
learning should reform the curia was bad enough ; that 
the papal nuncio Vergerio, after being sent on a mis- 
sion to Wittenberg, should go over to the enemy, was 
worse; that cardinals like Contarini and Pole should 
preach justification by faith and concede much that 
the Protestants asked, was worst of all. *'No one 
now passes at Rome," wrote Peter Anthony Bandini 
about 1540, ''as a cultivated man or a good courtier 
who does not harbor some heretical opinions." Paul 
Sarpi, the eminent historian of Trent, reports that 
Luther's arguments were held to be unanswerable at 
Rome, but that he was resisted in order that authority 
might be upheld. For this statement he appeals to a 
diary of Francis Chieregato, an eminent ecclesiastic 
who died on December 6, 1539. As the diary has not 
been found, Lord Acton rejects the assertion, believing 
that Sarpi 's word cannot be taken unsupported. But 
a curious confirmation of Sarpi 's assertion, and one Sarpi's 
that renders it acceptable, is found in Luther's table 
talk. Speaking on February 22, 1538, he says that 
he has heard from Rome that it was there believed to 
be impossible to refute him until St. Paul had been 
deposed. He regarded this as a signal testimony to 
the truth of his doctrines ; to us it is valuable only as 
an evidence of Roman opinion. It is not too much to 
say that at about that time the most disting-uished 
Italian prelates were steering for Wittenberg and 
threatened to take Rome with them. How they failed 
is the history of the Counter-reformation. 

§ 2. The Papacy. 1522-1590 

Nothing can better indicate the consternation caused 
at Rome by the appearance of the Lutheran revolt thau 



assertion 



378 



THE COUNTEH-EEFORMATION 



Adrian VI, 

January, 

1522-Sep- 

tember, 

1523 



December, 
1521 



the fact that for the first time in 144 years and for 
the last time in history the cardinals elected as supreme 
pontiff a man who was not an Italian, Adrian of 
Utrecht. After teaching theology at Louvain he had 
been appointed tutor to Prince Charles and, on the 
accession of his pupil to the Spanish throne was cre- 
ated Bishop of Tortosa, and shortly thereafter car- 
dinal and Inquisitor General of Spain. While in this 
country he distinguished himself equally by the just- 
ness of his administration and by his bitter hatred 
of Luther, against Avhom he wrote several letters both 
to his imperial master and to his old colleagues at 
Louvain. 

The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually 
long conclave, on account of the even balance of par- 
ties. At last, despairing of agreement, and feeling 
also that extraordinary measures were needed to meet 
the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in Jan- 
uary, offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among 
modern popes, kept his baptismal name while in office. 
The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish much was due 
largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty 
months, and still more to the invincible corruption he 
found at Rome. His really high sense of duty awak- 
ened no response save fear and hatred among the 
courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore 
the ruined finances of the church he was accused of 
.niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was 
called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his 
appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole 
evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of 
the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the 
arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes 
of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, 
phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their 
tongue nor their ways. 



THE PAPACY 379 

Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank 
into his grave, a good pope unwept and unhonored as 
few bad popes have ever been. On his tomb the car- 
dinals wrote: '^Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme 
misfortune in life was that he was called upon to 
rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily 
by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's 
physician and labeled it, ''Liberatori Patriae." 

The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in poli- Clement 
tics was particularly marked in the elections to the 1523-34 
papacy of the sixteenth century. In almost every in- 
stance the new pope was an opponent, and in some 
sort a contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was 
this more true than in the election of 1523. Deciding 
that if Adrian's methods were necessary to save the 
church the medicine was worse than the disease, the 
cardinals lost no time in raising another Medici to 
the throne. Like all of his race, Clement VII was a 
patron of art and literature, and tolerant of abuses. 
Personally moral and temperate, he cared little save 
for an easy life and the advancement of the Three 
Balls. He began that policy, which nearly proved fatal 
to the church, of treating the Protestants with alternate 
indulgence and severity. But for himself the more im- 
mediate trouble came not from the enemy of the church 
but from its protector. Though Adrian was an old 
officer of Charles V, it was really in the reign of Cle- 
ment that the process began by which first Italy, then 
the papacy, then the whole church was put under the 
Spanish yoke. 

After Pavia and the treaty of Madrid had eliminated Spanish 
French influence, Charles naturally felt his power and 
naturally intended to have it respected even by the 
pope. Irritated by Clement's perpetual deceit and 
intrigue with France, Charles addressed to him, in 
1526, a document which Ranke calls the most formi- 



influence, 
1525-6 



380 THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 

dable ever used by any Catholic prince to a pope dur- 
ing the century, containing passages ''of which no 
follower of Luther need be ashamed." 
Sack of Rather to threaten the pope than to make war on 

andSeptem- ^^^^' Charles gathered a formidable army of German 
ber, 1527 and Spanish soldiers in the north under the command 
of his general Frundsberg. All the soldiers were rest- 
less and mutinous for want of pay, and in addition 
to this a powerful motive worked among the German 
landsknechts. Many of them were Lutheran and 
looked to the conquest of Rome as the triumph of their 
cause. As they loudly demanded to be lead against 
Antichrist, Frundsberg found that his authority was 
March 16, powcrlcss to stop them. When he died of rage and 
mortification the French traitor Charles, Constable of 
Bourbon, was appointed by the emperor in his place, 
and, finding there was nothing else to do, led the army 
against Rome and promised the soldiers as much booty 
as they could take. Twice, in May and September, 
the city was put to the horrors of a sack, with all the 
atrocities of murder, theft and rapine almost insep- 
arable from war. In addition to plundering, the Lu- 
therans took particular pleasure in desecrating the 
objects of veneration to the Catholics. Many an image 
and shrine was destroyed, while Luther was acclaimed 
pope by his boisterous champions. But far away on 
the Elbe he heard of the sack and expressed his sorrow 
for it. 

The importance of the sack of Rome, like that of 
other dramatic events, is apt to be exaggerated. It 
has been called the end of the Renaissance and the be- 
ginning of the Catholic reaction. It was neither the 
one nor the other, but only one incident in the long, 
stubborn process of the Hispanization of Italy and the 
church. For centuries no emperor had had so much 
power in Italy as had Charles. With Naples and Mi- 



THE PAPACY 381 

Ian were now linked Siena and Genoa under his rule ; 
the states of the church were virtually at his disposal, 
and even Florence, under its hereditary duke, Alex- 
ander de' Medici, was for a while under the control 
of the pope and through him, of Charles. 

Nor did the fall of the holy city put the fear of God 
into the hearts of the prelates for more than a mo- 
ment. The Medici, Clement, who never sold his soul 
but only pawned it from time to time, without entirely 
abandoning the idea of reform, indefinitely postponed 
it. Procrastinating, timid, false, he was not the man 
to deal with serious abuses. He toyed with the idea 
of a council but when, on the mere rumor that a coun- 
cil was to be called the prices of all salable offices 
dropped in a panic, he hesitated. Moreover he feared 
the council would be used by the emperor to subordi- 
nate him even in spiritual matters. Perhaps he meant 
well, but abuses were too lucrative to be lightly af- 
fronted. As to Lutheranism, Clement was completely 
misinformed and almost completely indifferent. 
While he and the emperor were at odds it grew might- 
ily. Here as elsewhere he was irresolute ; his pontifi- 
cate, as a contemporary wrote, was "one of scruples, 
considerations and discords, of buts and ifs and tliens 
and moreovers, and plenty of words without effect. ' ' 

The pontificate of Paul III marks the turning point Paul ill, 
in the Catholic reaction. Under him the council of 
Trent was at last opened; the new orders, especially 
the Jesuits, were formed, and such instiTimentalities I 
as the Inquisition and Index of prohibited books put 
on a new footing. Paul III, a Farnese from the States 
of the Church, owed his election partly to his strength 
of character, partly to the weakness of his health, for 
the cardinals liked frequent vacancies in the Holy See. 
Cautious and choleric, prolix and stubborn, he had a 
real desire for reform and an earnest wish to avoid 



382 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

quarrels with either of the great powers that menaced 
him, the emperor and France. The reforming spirit 
of the pope showed itself in the appointment of several 
men of the highest character to the cardinalate, among 
them Gaspar Contarini and Fisher, Bishop of Roches- 
ter. In other cases, however, the exigencies of poli- 
tics induced the nomination of bad men, such as Del 
Monte and David Beaton. At the same time a com- 
mission was named to recommend practical reforms. 
The draft for a bull they presented for this purpose 
was rejected by the Consistory, but some of their re- 
commendations, such as the prohibition of the Roman 
clergy to visit taverns, theaters and gambling dens, 
were adopted. 
May, 1535 A second commission of nine ecclesiastics of high 
ddectorum ^^^^^I'acter, including John Peter Caraffa, Contarini, 
cardinaiium Polc and Giberti, was created to make a comprehensive 
et aiiorum j-Qpoj.^ q^ reform. The important memorial they drew 

praelatorum '- i ^ 

up fully exposed the prevalent abuses. The root of all 
they found in the exaggeration of the papal power of 
collation and the laxity with which it was used. Not 
only were morally unworthy men often made bishops 
and prelates, but dispensations for renunciation of 
benefices, for absenteeism and for other hurtful prac- 
tices were freely sold. The coromission demanded 
drastic reform of these abuses as well as of the monas- 
tic orders, and called for the abolition of the venal 
exercise of spiritual authority by legates and nuncios. 
But the reform memorial, excellent and searching as 
it was, led to nothing. At most it was of some use 
as a basis of reforms made by the Council of Trent 
later. But for the moment it only rendered the posi- 
tion of the church more difficult. The reform of the 
Dataria, for example, the office which sold graces, priv- 
ileges, indults, dispensations and benefices, was con- 



THE PAPACY 383 

sidered impossible because half of the papal revenue, 
or 110,000 ducats annually, came from it. Nor could 
the fees of the Penitentiary be abolished for fear of 
bankruptcy, though in 1540 they were partially re- 
duced. The most obvious results of the Consilium was ^538 
to put another weapon into the hands of the Lutherans. 
Published by an unauthorized person, it was at once 
seized upon by the Reformers as proof of the hopeless 
depravity of the Curia. So dangerous did it prove to 
simple-minded Catholics that it was presently put on 
the Index ! 

Paul's diplomacy tried to play off the Empire 
against France and to divert the attention of both to 
a crusade against the Turk. Hoping to advance the 
cause of the church by means of the war declared by 
Charles V on the Schmalkaldic League, the pope, in 
return for a subsidy, exacted a declaration in the --- 
treaty, that the reason of the war was religious and the 
occasion for it the refusal of the Protestants to recog- 
nize the Council of Trent's authority. But when 
Charles was victor he used his advantage only to 
strengthen his o^\ti prerogative, not effectively to sup- 
press heresy. Paul now dreaded the emperor more 
than he did the Protestants and his position was not 
made easier by the threat of Charles to come to terms 
mth the Lutherans did Paul succeed in rousing France 
against him. In fact, with all his squirming, Paul III 
only sank deeper into the Spanish vassalage, while 
the championship of the church passed from his con- 
trol into that of new agencies that he had created. 

It was perhaps an effort to free the Holy See from Julius ni, 
the Spanish yoke that led the cardinals to raise to the ^^^^~^ 
purple, as Julius III, Cardinal John Mary Ciocchi del 
Monte who as one of the presidents of the oecumenical 
pouncil had distinguished himself by his opposition to 



384 



THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 



Marcellus 
II, April 
9-May 1, 
1555 ^^' 

Paul IV, 
1555-9 ; 



Pius IV, 
1560-5 



the emperor. Nevertheless his pontificate marked a 
relaxation of the church 's effort, for policy or strength 
to pursue reform he had none. 

Marcellus II, who was pope for twenty-two days, 
would hardly be remembered save for the noble Mass 
of Pope Marcellus dedicated to him by Palestrina. 

With the elevation of Cardinal Caraffa to the tiara 
Peter's keys were once more restored to strong hands 
and a reforming heart. The founder of the Theatines 
was a hot-blooded Neapolitan still, in spite of his 
seventy-nine years, hale and hearty. Among the re- 
forms he accomplished were some regulations relating 
to the residence of bishops and some rules for the 
bridling of Jews, usurers, prostitutes, players and 
mountebanks. But he was unable to reform himself. 
He advanced his young kinsmen shamelessly to polit- 
ical office. His jealousy of the Jesuits, in whom he 
saw a rival to his own order, not only caused him to 
neglect to use them but made him put them in a very 
critical position. Nor did he dare to summon again 
the council that had been prorogued, for fear that 
some stronger power should use it against himself. 
He chafed under the Spanish yoke, coming nearer to 
a conflict with Charles V and his son Philip II than 
any pope had ventured to do. He even thought of 
threatening Philip with the Inquisition, but was re- 
strained by prudence. In his purpose of freeing Italy 
from foreign domination he accomplished nothing 
whatever. 

Pius IV was a contrast to the predecessor whom he 
hated. John Angelo Medici, of Milan, not connected 
with the Florentine family, was a cheerful, well-wish- 
ing, beneficent man, genial and fond of life, a son of the 
Renaissance, a patron of art and letters. The choice 
of a name often expresses the ideals and tendencies of 
^ pope J that of Pius was chosen perhaps in imitation 



THE PAPACY 385 

of Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the most fa- 
mous humanist to sit on the fisherman's throne. And 
yet the spirit of the times no longer allowed the gross 
licentiousness of the earlier age, and the cause of re- 
form progressed not a little under the diplomatic guid- 
ance of the Milanese. In the first place, doubtless 
from personal motives, he made a fearful example of 
the kinsmen of his predecessor, four of whcm he exe- 
cuted chiefly for the reason that they had been ad- 
vanced by papal influence. This salutary example 
practically put an end to nepotism; at least the un- 
fortunate nephews of Paul IV were the last to aspire 
to independent principalities solely on the strength of 
kinship to a pope. 

The demand for the continuation and completion of Reforms 
the general council, which had become loud, was ac- 
ceded to by Pius who thought, like the American boss, 
that at times it was necessary to ''pander to the pub- 
lic conscience." The happy issue of the council, from 
his point of view, in its complete submissiveness to 
the papal prerogative, led Pius to emphasize the spir- 
itual rather than the political claims of the hierarchy. 
In this the church made a great gain, for, as the his- 
tory of the time shows plainly, in the game of politics 
the papacy could no longer hold its own against the 
national states surrounding it. Pius leaned heavily 
on Philip, for by this time Spain had become the ac- 
knowledged champion of the church, but he was able 
to do so without loss of prestige because of the grad- 
ual separation of the temporal from the spiritual 
power. 

Among his measures the most noteworthy was one 
regulating the powers of the college of cardinals, while 
their exclusive right to elect the pontiff was main- 
tained against the pretensions of the council. The 
best Catholic spirit of the time was represented in 



386 THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 

Cardinal Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, an 
excellent prelate who sought to win back members of 
Christ to the fold by his good example, while he did 
not disdain to use the harsher methods of persecution 
when necessary. Among the amiable weaknesses of 
Pius was the belief, inherited from a bygone age, that 
the Protestants might still be reunited to the church 
by a few concessions, such as those of the marriage 
of the clergy and the use of the cup by the laity. 
^566^2 With Pius V a sterner spirit entered into the coun- 

cils of the church. The election of the Dominican and 
Chief Inquisitor Michael Ghislieri was a triumph for 
the policy of Borromeo. His pitiless hatred of the 
heretics hounded Catharine de' Medici against the 
Huguenots, and Philip II against the Dutch. Con- 
trary to the dictates of prudence and the wishes of the 
, greatest Catholic princes, he issued the bull deposing 
Elizabeth. But he was severe to himself, an ascetic 
nicknamed for his monkish narrowness ''Friar 
Wooden-shoe" by the Roman populace. He ruthlessly 
reformed the Italian clergy, meting out terrible pun- 
ishments to all sinners. Under his leadership Cathol- 
icism took the offensive in earnest and accomplished 
much. His zeal won him the name of saint, for he 
was the last of the Roman pontiffs to be canonized. 

But the reign of sainthood coupled with absolutism 
is apt to grow irksome, and it was with relief that the 
Romans hailed the election of Hugo Buoncompagno as 
Gregory Gregory XIII. He did little but follow out, somewhat 
1572^5 weakly, the paths indicated by his predecessors. So 
heavily did he lean on Spain that he was called the 
chaplain of Philip, but, as the obligations were mu- 
tual, and the Catholic king came also to depend more 
and more upon the spiritual arms wielded by the 
papacy, it might just as well have been said that Philip 
was the executioner employed by Gregory. The 



THE PAPACY 387 

mediocrity of his rule did not prevent notable achieve- 
ment by the Jesuits in the cause of the church. His 
reform of the calendar will be described more fully 
elsewhere. 

Gregory XIII offers an opportunity to measure the 
moral standard of the papacy after half a century of 
reform. His policy was guided largely by his ruling 
passion, love of a natural son, born before he had taken 
priest's orders, whom he made Gonfaloniere of the 
church and would have advanced to still further pre- 
ferment had not his advisers objected. Gregory was 
the pope who thanked God *'for the grace vouchsafed ^^ 
unto Christendom" in the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew. He was also the pope who praised and encour- 
aged the plan for the assassination of Elizabeth.^ 

In the person of Sixtus V the spirit of Pius V re- SixtusV, 
turned to power. Felix Poretti was a Franciscan and i^^^"^^ 
an Inquisitor, an earnest man and a hard one. Like 
his predecessors pursuing the goal of absolutism, he 
had an advantage over them in the blessing disguised 
as the disaster of the Spanish Armada. From this 
time forAvard the papacy was forced to champion its 
cause with the spiritual weapons at its command, and 
the gain to it as a moral and religious power was enor- 
mous. In some ways it assumed the primacy of Cath- 
olic Europe, previously usurped by Spain, and at- 
tained an influence that it had not had since the Great 
Schism of the fourteenth century. 

The reforms of Sixtus are important rather for their 
comprehensive than for their drastic quality. The 
whole machinery of the Curia was made over, the rou- 
tine of business being delegated to a number of stand- 
ing committees known as Congregations, such as the 
Congregation of Ceremonies to watch over matters of 
precedence at the papal court, and the Congregation 

1 A.nie, p. 338. 



388 THE COUNTEK-EEFORMATION 

of the Consistory to prepare the work of the Con- 
sistory. The number of cardinals was fixed at seventy. 
New editions of the breviary and of the Index were 
carefully prepared. At the same time the moral re- 
forms of Trent were laxly carried out, for while de- 
crees enforcing them were promulgated by Sixtus with 
one hand, with the other he sold dispensations and 
privileges. 

§ 3. The Council of Trent 

While the popes were enjoying their jii^ incorrigi- 
hilitatis — as Luther wittily expressed it — the church 
was going to rack and ruin. Had the safety of Peter's 
boat been left to its captains, it would apparently have 
foundered in the waves of schism and heresy. No such 
dangerous enemy has ever attacked the church as that 
then issuing from her own bosom. Neither the me- 
dieval heretics nor the modem philosophers have won 
from her in so short a time such masses of adherents. 
Where Voltaire slew his thousands Luther slew his 
ten thousands, for Voltaire appealed only to the in- 
tellect, Luther appealed to the conscience. 
Decline of The extraordinary thing about the Protestant con- 
quests was their sudden end. Within less than fifty 
years the Scandinavian North, most of Germany in- 
cluding Austria, parts of Hungary, Poland, most of 
Switzerland, and Great Britain had declared for the 
''gospel." France was divided and apparently going 
the same road ; even in Italy there were serious symp- 
toms of disaffection. That within a single generation 
the tide should be not only stopped but rolled back is 
one of the most dramatic changes of fortune in history. 
The only country which Protestantism gained after 
1560 was the Dutch Republic. Large parts of Ger- 
many and Poland were won back to the church, and 
Catholicism made safe in all the Latin countries. 



Protestant- 
ism 



THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 



389 



The spirit that accomplished this work was the spirit 
of Spain. More extraordinary than the rapid growth 
of her empire was the conquest of Europe by her 
ideals. The character of the Counter-reformation was 
determined by her genius. It was not, as it started to 
be in Italy, a more or less inwardly Christianized Re- 
naissance. It was a distinct and powerful religious re- 
vival, and one that showed itself, as many others have 
done, by a mighty reaction. Medievalism was re- 
stored, largely by medieval methods, the general coun- 
cil, the emphasis on tradition and dogma, coercion of 
mind and body, and the ministrations of a monastic 
order, new only in its discipline and effectiveness, a 
reduplication of the old mendicant orders in spirit and 
ideal. 

The Oecumenical Council was so double-edged a 
weapon that it is not remarkable that the popes hesi- 
tated to grasp it in their war with the heretic. They 
had uncomfortable memories of Constance and Basle, 
of the election and deposition of popes and of decrees 
limiting their prerogatives. And, moreover, the coun- 
cil was the first authority invoked by the heretic him- 
self. Adrian might have been willing to risk such a 
synod, but before he had time to call one, his place was 
taken by the vacillating and pusillanimous Clement. 
Perpetually toying with the idea he yet allowed the 
pressure of his courtiers and the difficulties of the po- 
litical situation — for France was opposed to the coun- 
cil as an imperial scheme — indefinitely to postpone the 
summons. 

The more serious-minded Paul III found another 
lion in his path. He for the first time really labored 
to summon the general synod, but he found that the 
Protestants had now changed their position and would 
no longer consent to recognize its authority under any 
conditions to which he Qould possibly assent. Though 



Spanish 
revival 



Preparation 
for calling 
a council 



390 



THE COUNTt]lt-EEFOfeMATION 



Summons 
of Council, 
November 
19, 1544 



First period 
1545-7 



his nuiicio Vergerio received in Gerinany and even in 
Wittenberg a cordial welcome, it was soon discovered 
that the ideas of the proper constitution of the council 
entertained by the two parties were irreconciliable. 
Fundamentally each wanted a council in which its own 
predominance should be assured. The Schmalkaldic 
princes, on the advice of their theologians, asked for 
a free German synod in which they should have a ma- 
jority vote, and in this they were supported by Fran- 
cis I and Henry VIII. Naturally no pope could con- 
sent to any such measures; under these discouraging 
circumstances, the opening of the council was contin- 
ually postponed, and in place of it the emperor held a 
series of religious colloquies that only served to make 
the differences of the two parties more prominent. 

After several years of negotiation the path was made 
smooth and the bull Laetare Hierusalem summoned a 
general synod to meet at Trent on March 15, 1545, and 
assigned it three tasks: (1) The pacification of reli- 
gious disputes by doctrinal decisions; (2) the reform 
of ecclesiastical abuses; (3) the discussion of a crusade 
against the infidel. Delay still interfered with the 
opening of the assembly, which did not take place un- 
til December 15, 1545. 

The council was held at three separate periods with 
long intervals. The first period was 1545-7, the sec- 
ond 1551-2, the third 1562-3. The city of Trent was 
chosen in order to yield to the demand for a German 
town while at the same time selecting that one nearest 
to Italy, for the pope was determined to keep the ac- 
tion of the synod under control. Two measures were 
adopted to insure this end, the initiative and presidency 
of the papal legates and packing the membership. The 
faculties to be granted the legates were already decided 
upon in 1544; these lieutenants were to be, according 
to Father Paul Sarpi, angels of peace to preside, make 



THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 391 

all necessary regulations, and publish them ' ' according 
to custom." The phrase that the council should de- 
cide on measures, '4egatis proponentibus" was simply 
the constitutional expression of the principal familiar 
in many governments, that the legislative should act 
only on the initiative of the executive, thus giving an 
immense advantage to the latter. The second means 
of subordinating the council was the decision to vote 
by heads and not by nations and to allow no proxies. 
This gave a constant majority to the Italian prelates 
sent by the pope. So successful were these measures 
that the French ambassador bitterly jested of the 
Holy Ghost coming to Trent in the mailbags from 
Eome. 

At the first session there were only thirtv-four mem- ^Jf^^ber- 

" . ship 

bers entitled to vote : four cardinals, four archbishops, 
twenty-one bishops and five generals of orders. There 
w^ere also present other personages, including an am- 
bassador from King Ferdinand, four Spanish secular 
priests and a number of friars. The first question 
debated was the precedence of dogma or reform. Re- 
garding the council chiefly as an instrument for con- 
demning the heretics, the pope was in favor of taking 
up dogma first. The emperor, on the other hand, wish- 
ing rather to conciliate the Protestants and if possible 
to lure them back to the old church, was in favor of 
starting with reform. The struggle, which was carried 
on not so much on the floor of the synod as behind the 
members' backs in the intrigues of courts, was de- 
cided by a compromise to the effect that both dogma 
and reform should be taken up simultaneously. But 
all enactments dealing with ecclesiastical irregularities 
were to bear the proviso ''under reservation of the 
papal authority. ' * 

The dogmatic decrees at Trent were almost wholly Dogmatic 
oriented by the polemic against Protestantism. Prac- ^^^^^ 



392 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

tically nothing was defined save what had already been 
taken up in the Augsburg Confession or in the writings 
of Calvin, of Zwingli and of the Anabaptists. Inevi- 
tably, a spirit so purely defensive could not be animated 
by a primarily philosophical interest. The guiding 
star was not a system but a policy, and this policy was 
nothing more nor less than that of re-establishing tra- 
dition. The practice of the church was the standard 
applied; many an unhistorical assertion was made to 
justify it and many a practice of comparatively recent 
growth was sanctioned by the postulate that "it had 
descended from apostolic use." *'By show of an- 
tiquity they introduce novelty," was Bacon's correct 
judgment. 

Bibleand Quite naturally the first of the important dogmatic 
decrees was on the basis of authority. The Protestants 
had acknowledged the Bible only; over against them the 
Tridentine fathers declared for the Bible and the tra- 
dition of the church. The canon of Scripture was 
different from that recognized by the Protestants in 
that it included the Apocrypha. 

justifica- After passing various reform decrees on preaching, 

catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and 
indulgences, the council took up the thorny question 
of justification. Discussion was postponed for some 
months out of consideration for the emperor, who 
feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave 
his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form 
acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply 
the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very 
bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of 
the debate. The passions of the right reverend fa- 
thers were so excited by the consideration of a funda- 
mental article of their faith that in the course of dis- 
putation they accused one another of conduct unbe- 
coming to Christians, taunted one another with ple- 



tion 



THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 393 

beian origin and tore hair from one another's beards. 
The decree as finally passed established the position 
that faith and works together justify, and condemned 
the semi-Lutheran doctrines of "duplicate justice" and 
imputed righteousness hitherto held by such eminent 
theologians as Contarini and Cajetan. 

Having accomplished this important work the coun- 
cil appeared to the pope ready for dissolution. The 
protests of the emperor kept it together for a few 
months longer, but an outbreak of the spotted fever 
and the fear of a raid during the Schmalkaldic war, 
served as sufficient excuses to translate the council to 
Bologna. Though nothing w^as accomplished in this ^^^^ ' 
city the assembly was not formally prorogued until 
September 13, 1549. 

Under pressure from the emperor Pope Julius III Second 
convoked the synod for a second time at Trent on May i55i°_2 
1, 1551. The personnel was different. The Jesuits 
Lainez and Salmeron were present working in the in- 
terests of the papacy. No French clergy took part 
as Henry II was hostile. The Protestants were re- 
quired to send a delegation, which was received on 
January 24, 1552. They presented a confession, but 
declined to recognize the authority of a body in which 
they were not represented. Several dogmatic decrees 
were passed on the sacraments, reasserting transub- 
stantiation and all the doctrines and usages of the 
church. A few reform decrees were also passed, but 
before a great deal could be accomplished the revolt 
of Maurice of Saxony put both emperor and council in 
a precarious position and the latter was consequently 
prorogued for a second time on April 28, 1552. 

When, after ten long years, the council again con- J^^^ 
vened at the command of Pius IV, in January, 1562, 1562-3 
it is extraordinary^ to see how little the problems con- 
fronting it had changed. Not only was the struggle 

L 



394 THE COUNTER-EEFOEMATION 

for poT\'er betM^een pope and council and between pope 
and emperor still going on, but hopes were still enter- 
tained in some quarters of reconciling the schismatics. 
Pius invited all princes, whether Catholic or heretical, 
to send delegates, but was rebuffed by some of them. 
The argument was then taken up by the Emperor Fer- 
dinand who sent in an imposing demand for reforms, 
including the authorization of the marriage of priests, 
communion in both kinds, the use of the vulgar tongue 
in divine service, and drastic rules for the improvement 
of the convents and of the papal courts. 
Jesuits The contention over this bone among the fathers, 

present , , *^ ' 

now far more numerous than in the earlier days, waxed 
so hot that for ten whole months no session could be 
held. Mobs of the partisans of the various factions 
fought in the streets and bitter taunts of "French dis- 
eases" and ''Spanish eruptions" were exchanged be- 
tween them. For a time the situation seemed inex- 
tricable and one cardinal prophesied the impending 
dowTifall of the papacy. But in the nick of time to 
prevent such a catastrophe the pope was able to send 
into the field the newly recruited praetorian guards of 
the Society of Jesuits. Under the command of Car- 
dinal Morone these indefatigable zealots turned the 
flank of the opposing forces partly by intrigue at the 
imperial court, partly by skilful manipulation of de- 
bate. The emperor's mind was changed; reforms de- 
manded by him were dropped. 

The questions actually taken up and settled were 
dogmatic ones, chiefly concerning the sacrifice of the 
mass and the perpetuation of the Catholic customs of 
communion in one kind, the celebration of masses in 
honor of saints, the celebration of masses in which the 
priest only communicates, the mixing of water with the 
wine, the prohibition of the use of the vulgar tongue, 
and the sanction of masses for the dead. Other de- 



to papacy 



1564 



of decrees 



THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 395 

crees amended the marriage laws, and enjoined the 
preparation of an Index of prohibited books, of a 
catechism and of standard editions of missal and bre- 
viary. 

How completely the council in its last estate was sub- Subjection 
dued to the will of the pope is shown by its request that 
the decrees should all be confirmed by him. This was 
done by Pius IV in the bull Benedictus Deus. Pius January 26, 
also caused to be prepared a symbol known as the Tri- 
dentine Profession of Faith which was made binding 
on all priests. Save that it was slightly enlarged in 
1877 by the pronouncement on Papal Infallibility, it 
stands to the present day. 

The complete triumph of the papal claims was offset Reception 
by the cool reception which the decrees received in 
Catholic Europe. Only the Italian states, Poland, Por- 
tugal and Savoy unreservedly recognized the authority 
of all of them. Philip II, bigot as he was, preferred 
to make his own rules for his clergj^ and recognized the 
laws of Trent with the proviso "saving the royal 
rights. " France sanctioned only the dogmatic, not the 
practical decrees. The emperor never officially recog- 
nized the work of the council at all. Nor were the gov- 
ernments the only recalcitrants. According to Sarpi 
the body of German Catholics paid no attention to the 
prescribed reforms and the council was openly mocked 
in France as claiming an authority superior to that of 
the apostles. 

To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent 
observer of the next generation, the council seemed to 
have been a failure if not a fraud. Its history he calls 
an Iliad of woes. The professed objects of the coun- 
cil, healing the schism and asserting the episcopal 
power he thinks frustrated, for the schism was made 
irreconciliable and the church reduced to servitude. 

But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of 



396 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

Construe- the great historian, at least as far as the value of the 

tive wor -^ork done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is con- 
cerned. If the church shut out the Protestants and 
recognized her limited domain, she at least took ap- 
propriate measures to establish her rule over what was 
left. Her power was now collected; her dogma was 
unified and made consistent as opposed to the mutually 
diverse Protestant creeds. In several points, indeed, 
where the opinion of the members was divided, the 
words of the decrees were ambiguous, but as against 
the Protestants they were distinct and so comprehen- 
sive as rather to supersede than to supplement earlier 
standards. 

Nor should the moral impulse of the council be un- 
derestimated, ridiculed though it was by its opponents 
as if expressed in the maxim, '*si non caste, tamen 
caute." Sweeping decrees for urgent reforms were 
passed, and above all a machinery set up to carry 
on the good work. In providing for a catechism, for 
authoritative editions of the Vulgate, bre\iary and 
other standard works, in regulating moot points, in 
striking at lax discipline, the council did a lasting serv- 
ice to Catholicism and perhaps to the world. Not the 
least of the practical reforms was the provision for the 
opening of seminaries to train the diocesan clergy. 
The first measure looking to this was passed in 1546 ; 

1563 Cardinal Pole at once began to act upon it, and a de- 

cree of the third session ordered that each diocese 
should have such a school for the education of priests. 

1565 The Roman seminary, opened two years later, was a 

model for subsequent foundations. 

§ 4. The Company of Jesus 

If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reac- 
tion to medievalism it was in part also a religious re- 
vival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant exam- 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 397 

pie, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of 
Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more 
was it the answer to a demand on the part of the 
church for an instrument with which to combat the 
dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new 
worlds of heathenism. 

Great crises in the church have frequently produced 
new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Ber- 
nard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from 
the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the 
adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin ^^^ 

^ . mon- 

Chnstianity. Several new orders, all with more or astic 
less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth ^'^^^^ 
century. Under Leo X there assembled at Rome a 
number of men united by the wish to renew their spir- 
itual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory 
of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration 
of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the 
order of Theatines, a body of devoted priests, dressing 1524 
not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, 
who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic 
reformation. Their especial task was to educate the 
clergy. 

The order of the Capuchins was an offshoot of the c-1526 
Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the 
early friars and its members went about teaching the 
poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third 
vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flour- 
ished and turned its energies especially against the 
heretics. 

Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barna- 
bites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of 
Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common 
characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that 
they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the 
salvation of the individual soul but also the ameliora- 



398 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

tion of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the 
orders devoted themselves to the education of children, 
some to home missions or foreign missions, some to 
nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. 
The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the 
way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the 
organization of the Company of Jesus. 

je^stdt ^^^^ Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, 

like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less ex- 
ploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, 
Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls 
to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, 
handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, 
dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts 
and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advance- 
ment of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal 
first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit 
was necessarily immoral and venomous ; the implacable 
hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as 
criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand 
they have had their apologists and friends even outside 
their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, but 
seek to understand them. 

^°J^1^ In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever- 

c. 1493- 

1556 lastmg nay at Worms one of his auditors was — or 

might have been for she was undoubtedly present in 
the city — Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave 
John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous 
young woman had been by a former marriage the sec- 
ond wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she 
had been known and worshipped by a young page of 
good family, liiigo de Loyola. Like the romantic 
Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for 
his lady *'no duchess nor countess but one far higher" 
and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old 
chivalry. Not that this prevented him from address- 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 399 

ing less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if 
something of a Don Quixote he was also something of 
a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his 
''enormous misdemeanors" had caused him to be tried 
before a court of justice and little did his plea of bene- 
fit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a 
tonsure on his head ' * even as large as a seal on a papal 
bull," and he was probably punished severely. 

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. 
When the French army invaded Spain he was given 
command of the fortress of Pampeluna. Defending it 
bravely against desperate odds he was wounded in the May 21, 
leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg 
was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With in- 
domitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched 
on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the 
torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. 
The young man of about twenty-eight — the exact year 
of his birth is unknown — found himself a cripple for 
life. 

To while away the long hours of convalescence he 
asked for the romances of chivalry but was unable to 
get them and read in their place legends of the saints 
and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His im- 
agination took fire at the new possibilities of heroism 
and of fame. ''What if you should be a saint like 
Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what if 
you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His 
choice was fixed. He took Madonna for his lady and 
determined to become a soldier of Christ. 

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrim- 
age to Seville and Manresa and there dedicated his 
arms in a church in imitation of the knights he had 
read about in Amadis of Gaul. Then, with a general 
confession and much fasting and mortification of the 
flesh, began a period of doubt and spiritual anguish 



400 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

that has sometimes been compared with that of Luther. 
Both were men of strong will and intellect, both suf- 
fered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development 
was somewhat quieter and more normal — if, indeed, 
in the psychology of conversion so carefully studied by 
James, the quieter is the more normal. At any rate 
where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occa- 
sion, Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Igna- 
tius saw the Trinity as a clavichord with three strings, 
the miracle of transubstantiation as light in bread, 
Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, 
mysterious eyes, Jesus as ''a big round form shining 
as gold," and the Trinity again as ''a ball of fire." 
But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his 

1523 purpose. At first this took the form of a vow to 
preach to the infidels and he made a pilgrimage to 
Jerusalem, only to be turned back by the highest Chris- 
tian authority in that region, the politically-minded 
Franciscan vicar. 

1524 Qj-^ returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and 
started to learn Latin with boys, for his education as a 
gentleman had included nothing but reading and writ- 
ing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university 
of Alcala where he won disciples but was imprisoned 
for six weeks by the Inquisition and forbidden to hold 
meetings with them. Practically the same experience 
was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by 
the Holy Office for twenty-two days and again pro- 
hibited from holding religious meetings. Thus he was 
chased out of Spain by the church he sought to serve. 
Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of 
Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition 
he was publicly whipped by the college authorities as a 
dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless, here he gathered his 
first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fevre of Savoy, 
Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Gastilians, 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 401 

James Laynez and Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, 
hardly over five feet two inches high, deformed and 
scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his 
smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his 
mission and his book. 

If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature '[^? . 
not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the Exercises 
thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, 
the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its 
chief sources were the meditation and observation of 
its author. If he took some things from Garcia de 
Cisneros, some from The Imitation of Christ, some 
from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more 
he took from the course of discipline to which he had 
subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological 
soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery 
that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle 
his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to 
the verge of abnormality and the means which he took 
to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in 
his followers were drastic in the extreme. 

The purpose of the Exercises is stated in the axiom 
that **Man was created to praise, reverence and serve 
God our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a 
man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided 
into four periods called weeks, though each period 
might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of 
the director. The first week was devoted to the con- 
sideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as 
far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the 
fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing 
the tremendous power of the stimulant to be adminis- 
tered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in 
the application of it. But, subject only to the condi- 
tion that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he 
could bear, he was directed in the first week of soli- 



402 THE COUNTEE-EEFOEMATION 

tary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and 
depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies 
of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to 
taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of con- 
science and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable 
fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to 
picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all 
the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or 
glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the 
complete subjection of the man to the church. The 
Jesuit was directed ever ''to praise all the precepts of 
the church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for 
her defence and nowise in her offence." There must 
be an unconditional surrender to her not only of the will 
but of the intelligence. ''To make sure of being right 
in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold 
by the principle that the white I see I should believe to 
be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule it." 
Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, 
agreeing to be called henceforth the Company of Jesus 
— a military term, the socii being the companions or 
August 15, followers of a chief in arms — took vows to live in pov- 

1540 

erty and chastity and to make a pilgrimage to Jeru- 
y^ salem. With this object they set out to Venice and 
then turned towards Rome for papal approbation of 
their enterprise. Their first reception was chilling, 
but they gradually won a few new recruits and Igna- 
tius drafted the constitution for a new order which was 
S^eptember handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the 
bull Regimmi militantis ecclesiae, which quotes from 
;^ the formula of the Jesuits : 

"Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard 
of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on 
earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of 
perpetual chastity, consider that he is part of a society 
instituted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in 



27, 1540 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 403 

life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the 
faith through public preaching, the ministry of God's 
word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and espe- 
cially for the education of children and ignorant persons 
in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the 
giving of spiritual consolation. 

Moreover it is stated that the members of the new 
order should be bound by a vow of special obedience to 
the pope and should hold themselves ready at his be- 
hest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels, here- 
tics or schismatics, or to minister to believers. 

Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The April, 1541 
pope then cancelled the previous limitation of the num- 
ber of Jesuits to 60 and later issued a large charter of ^544 
privileges for them. They were exempted from taxes 1549 
and episcopal jurisdiction; no member was to be al- 
lowed to accept any dignity without the general's con- 
sent, nor could any member be assigned to the spiritual 
direction of women. Among many other grants 
was one to the effect that the faithful might confess 
to them and receive communion without permission of 
their parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges 
and a grant of others was made in a bull of July 21, 
1550. 

The express end of the order being the world-domi- OTrganha- 
nation of the church, its constitution provided a mar- Society of 
vellously apt organization for this purpose. Every- Jesus, 1550 
thing was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment 
from the world went only so far as necessary for the 
completer conquest of the world. Asceticism, fasting, 
self-discipline were to be moderate so as not to interfere 
with health. No special dress was prescribed, for it 
might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose 
being to win over the classes rather than the masses, 
the Jesuits were particular to select as members only 
robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and 



404 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also 
be rich and of good family was not requisite but was 
considered desirable. Men of bad reputation, intracti- 
ble, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted with 
heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited. 

After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation 
of two years. He was then assigned to the class of 
scholars for further discipline. He was later placed 
either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother 
charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coad- 
jutor, who took the three irrevocable vows. Finally, 
there was a class, to which admission was gained after 
long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the 
fourth being one of special obedience to the pope. A 
small number of secret Jesuits who might be consid- 
ered as another class, were charged with dangerous 
missions and with spying. 
General Over the order was placed a General who was prac- 

tically, though not theoretically, absolute. On paper he 
was limited by the possibility of being deposed and by 
the election, independently of his influence, of an '* ad- 
monitor" and some assistants. In practice the only 
limitations of his power were the physical ones inher- 
ent in the difficulties of administering provinces thou- 
sands of miles away. From every province, however, 
he received confidential reports from a multitude of 
spies. 

The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unques- 
tioning, blind obedience. The member must obey his 
superior "like a corpse which can be turned this way 
or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball of 
wax that might be moulded in any form." The ideal 
was an old one; the famous permde ac cadaver itself 
dates back to Francis of Assisi, but nowhere had the 
ideal been so completely realized as by the companions 
of Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 405 

Jesuits were but a natural culmination of the evolution 
of monasticism. More and more had the orders tended 
to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt to be 
used for the service of the church and of the pope. r- 

The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. Growth 
By 1544 they had nine establishments, two each in 
Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each in France, Ger- 
many and the Netherlands. When Loyola died Jesuits •^"^^^' 
could be found in Japan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and 
on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every 
country and included doctors at the largest universi- 
ties and papal nuncios to Poland and Ireland. There 
were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and 
1500 members. 

Their work was as broad as their field, but it was 
dedicated especially to three several tasks: education, 
war against the heretic, and foreign missions. Neither 
of the first two was particularly contemplated by the 
founders of the order in their earliest period. At that 
time they were rather like the friars, popular preach- 
ers, catechists, confessors and charitable workers. 
But the exigencies of the time called them to supply 
other needs. The education of the young was the nat- 
ural result of their desire to dominate the intellectual 
class. Their seminaries, at first adapted only to their 
owii uses, soon became famous. 

In the task of combating heresy they were also the Combating 
most successful of the papal cohorts. Though not the ^^^^^ 
primary purpose of the order, it soon came to be re- 
garded as their special field. The bull canonizing 
Loyola speaks of him as an instrument raised up by 
divine providence especially to combat that * 'foulest 
of monsters" Martin Luther. Beginning in Italy the 
Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety. Go- 
ing among the poor as missionaries they found many 
who knew no prayers, many who had not confessed for 



406 THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 

thirty or forty years, and a host of priests as blind as 
their flocks. 

In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for 
the right to exist. In France the Parlement of Paris 
was against them, and even after the king had granted 
them permission to settle in the country in 1553, the 
Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, de- 
stroying the peace of the church, supplanting the old 
orders and tearing do^\Ti more than they built up. 
Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great 
power, until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, 
they were able to crush their Catholic opponents, the 
Jansenists, as completely as their Protestant enemies 
were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 

In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as 
allies of the Spanish power. The people were im- 
pressed by their zeal, piety, and disinterestedness, and 
in the Southern provinces they were able to bear away 
a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism. 

In England, where they showed the most devotion, 
they met with the least success. The blood of their 
martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic seed, 
and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth. 
Jesuit The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won 

in Central Europe. When the first of their company, 
Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he found nearly 
the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Ba- 
varia were almost the only reigning family that never 
compromised with the Reformers and in them the 
Jesuits found their starting point and their most con- 
stant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and 
Vienna their success was great and from these foci 
they radiated in all directions, to Poland, to Hungary, 
to the Rhine. One of their most eminent missionaries 
was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in 1555 
in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two lan- 



victones 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 407 

guages, German and Latin, became the chief spiritual 
text-book of the Catholics. The idea and selection of 
material was borrowed from Luther and he was imi- 
tated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. 
This last feature was, of course, one of the strongest. 

But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as Missions to 
notable in lands beyond Europe as they w^re in the heathens 
heart of civilization. They were not, indeed, pioneers 
in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church 
showed itself from an early period solicitous for the 
salvation of the natives of America and of the Far 
East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his mo- 
tive in dividing the newly discovered lands between 
Spain and Portugal was chiefly to assist in the propa- 
gation of the faith. That the Protestants at first de- 
veloped no activity in the conversion of the heathen 
was partly because their energies were fully employed 
in securing their o^vn position, and still more, perhaps, 
because, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal 
had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic trade and 
thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with 
the natives. 

Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to 
America. Though some of them exemplified Chris- 
tian virtues that might well have impressed the na- 
tives, the greater number relied on the puissant sup- 
port of the Toledo sword. Though the natives, as 
heathen born in invincible ignorance, were exempt 
from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were 
driven by terror if not by fire, into embracing the re- 
ligion of their conquerors. If some steadfast chiefs 
told the missionaries that they would rather go to hell 
after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, 
the tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols over- 
thro\\Ti and their temples uprooted, embraced the re- 
ligion of the stronger God, as thcj^ quailed before his 



408 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

votaries. Little could they understand of the mys- 
teries of the faith, and in some places long continued 
to worship Christ and Mary with the ritual and at- 
tributes of older deities. But nominally a million of 
them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits 
arrived a still more successful effort was made to win 
over the red man. The important mission in Brazil, 
served by brave and devoted brothers of Ignatius, 
achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the 
Jesuits founded a state completely under their own 
tutelage. 

In the Far East the path of the missionary was 
broken by the trader. At Goa the first ambassadors of 
Christ were friars, and here they erected a cathedral, 
a convent, and schools for training native priests. But 

1506^52 ^^® greatest of the missionaries to this region was 
- Francis Xavier, the companion of Loyola. Not for- 
getting the vow which he, together with all the first 

April, members of the society, had taken, he sailed from Lis- 

bon, clothed with extraordinary powers. The pope 
made him his vicar for all the lands bathed by the 

May, 1542 Indian Ocean, and the king of Portugal gave him of- 
ficial sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put 
himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and be- 
gan an earnest fight against the immorality of the port, 
both Christian and native. His motto ''Amplius'* led 
him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the 
coast and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, 
thence to the Moluccas and to Japan, preaching in 
every place and baptizing by the thousand and ten 
thousand. 

Though Xavier was a man of brilliant endowments 
and though he was passionately devoted to the cause, to 
neither of his good qualities did he owe the successes, 
whether solid or specious, with which he has been cred- 
ited. In the first place, judged by the standards of 



THE COMPANY OF JESUS 409 

modem missions, the superficiality of his work was 
almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the 
languages of the countries which he visited. He 
learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed 
and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated 
them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound of a 
bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to 
individuals and he regarded the culmination of his 
work as being merely the administration of baptism 
and not the conversion of heart or understanding. 
Thus, he spent hours in baptizing, with all possible 
speed, sick and dying children, believing that he was 
thus rescuing their souls from limbo. Probably many 
of his adult converts never understood the meaning 
of the application of water and oil, salt and spittle, 
that make up the ritual of Catholic baptism. 

In the second place, what permanent success he Use of 
achieved was due largely to the invocation of the aid 
of the civil power. One of the most illuminating of 
Xavier's letters is that written to King John of Por- 
tugal on January 20, 1548, in which he not only makes 
the reasonable request that native Christians be pro- 
tected from persecution by their countrymen, but adds 
that every governor should take such measures to con- 
vert them as would insure success to his preaching, for 
without such support, he says, the cause of the gospel 
in the Indies would be desperate, few would come to 
baptism and those who did come would not profit much 
in religion. Therefore he urges that every governor, 
under whose rule many natives were not converted, 
should be mulcted of all his goods and imprisoned on 
his return to Portugal. What the measures applied 
by the Portugese officers must have been, under such 
pressure, can easily be inferred from a slight knowl- 
edge of their savage rule. 

It has been said that every organism carries in it- 



410 



THE COUNTER-KEFORMATION 



Decay of 
Jesuits 



1560 



1587 



Efficiency 



Failure 



self the seeds of its o^vn decay. The premature cor- 
ruption of the order was noticed by its more earnest 
members quite early in its career. The future gen- 
eral Francis Borgia wrote: *'The time will come when 
the Company Avill be completely absorbed in human 
sciences without any application to virtue; ambition, 
pride and arrogance will rule. ' ' The -General Aqua- 
viva said explicitly, ''Love of the things of this world 
and the spirit of the courtier are dangerous diseases 
in our Company. Almost in spite of us the evil creeps 
in little by little under the fair pretext of gaining 
princes, prelates, and the great ones of the world." 

A principal cause of the ultimate odium in which 
the Jesuits were held as Avell as of their temporary 
successes, was their desire for speedy results. Every 
one has noticed the immense versatility of the Jesuits 
and their superficiality. They produced excellent 
scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher 
Latin inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libra- 
ries of historical sources, of casuistry and apologetic, 
or write catechisms or epigrams. They turned with 
equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the 
production of art for the most cultivated peoples in 
the world. And yet they have rarely, if ever, produced 
a great scholar, a great scientist, a great thinker, or 
even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such 
purposes ; they were founded to fight for the church and 
they did that with extraordinary success. 

But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its 
own sake it must always become, soulless. In terms 
suggested by the Great War, the Jesuits were the in- 
carnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal 
of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanat- 
ical enthusiasm for that ideal and then to provide an 
organization and discipline marvellously adapted to 
conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster who 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 411 

proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat 
back the Reformation, have known how to do better 
than anyone else. Their methods took account of 
everything except the conscience of mankind. 

Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager 
pursuit of tangible results they lowered the ethical 
standards of the church. Wishing to open her doors 
as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they 
could not make all men saints, they brought down the 
requirements for admission to the average human level. 
One cannot take the denunciations of Jesuitical "casu- 
istry" and *'probabilism" at their face value, but one 
can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their 
early works, very dangerous compromises with the Jesuitical 
world. One reads in their books how the bankrupt, ^^^°' 
without sinning mortally, may defraud his creditors 
of his mortaged goods; how the servant may be ex- 
cused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man 
may pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the 
adulteress may rightfully deny her sin to her husband, 
even on oath.^ Doubtless these are extreme instances, 
but that they should have been possible at all is a mel- 
ancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, 
substitute inferior imitations for genuine morality. 

§ 5. The Inquisition and Index 

Not only by propaganda appealing to the mind and 
heart did the Catholic church roll back the tides of Ref- 
ormation and Renaissance, but by coercion also. In 
this the church was not alone; the Protestants also 
persecuted and they also censored the press w^th the 
object of preventing their adherents from reading the 
arguments of their opponents. But the Catholic 

1 Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of 
moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papst- 
tioms3, 1911, pp. 44711. 



412 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

church was not only more consistent in the application 
of her intolerant theories but she almost always as- 
sumed the direction of the coercive measures directly 
instead of applying them through the agency of the 
state. Divided as they were, dependent on the sup- 
port of the civil government and hampered, at least 
to some slight extent, by their more liberal tendencies, 
the Protestants never had instrumentalities half as 
efficient or one-tenth as terrible as the Inquisition and 
the Index. 

The Inquisition was a child of the Middle Ages. 
For centuries before Luther the Holy Office had cau- 
terized the heretical growths on the body of Mother 
Church. The old form w^as utilized but was given a 
new lease of life by the work it was called upon to per- 
form against the Protestants. Outside of the Nether- 
lands the two forms of the Inquisition which played the 
largest part in the battles of the sixteenth century were 
the Spanish and the Roman. 
Spanish In- The Inquisition was licensed in Spain by a bull of 
quisition g.^^^g jy ^f ^^yg^ ^^^ actually established by Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella in Castile in 1480, and soon after- 
wards in their other dominions. It has sometimes 
been said that the Spanish Inquisition was really a 
political rather than an ecclesiastical instrument, but 
the latest historian of the subject, whose deep study 
makes his verdict final, has disposed of this theory. 
Though occasionally called upon to interfere in polit- 
ical matters, this was exceptional. Far more often it 
asserted an authority and an independence that em- 
barrassed not a little the royal government. On the 
other hand it soon grew so great and powerful that it 
was able to ignore the commands of the popes. On 
account of its irresponsible power it was unpopular 
and was only tolerated because it was so efficient in 
crushing out the heresy that the people hated. 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 413 

The annals of its procedure and achievements are Procedure 
one long record of diabolical cruelty, of protracted con- 
finement in dungeons, of endless delay and browbeat- 
ing to break the spirit, of ingenious tortures and of 
racked and crushed limbs and of burning flesh. In 
mitigation of judgment, it must be remembered that 
the methods of the civil courts were also cruel at that 
time, and the punishments severe. 

As the guilt of the suspected person was always pre- 
sumed, every effort was made to secure confession, for 
in matters of belief there is no other equally satisfac- 
tory proof. Without being told the nature of his crime 
or who w^as the informant against him, the person on 
trial was simply urged to confess. An advocate was 
given him only to take advantage of his professional 
relations with his client by betraying him. The enor- 
mous, almost incredible procrastination by which the 
accused w^ould be kept in prison awaiting trial some- 
times for five or ten or even twenty years, usually suf- 
ficed to break his spirit or to unbalance his mind. Tor- 
ture was first threatened and then applied. All rules 
intended to limit its amount proved illusory, and it was 
applied practically to any extent deemed necessary, 
and to all classes ; nobles and clergy were no less ob- 
noxious to it than were commons. Nor w^as there any 
privileged age, except that of the tenderest childhood. 
Men and women of ninety and boys and girls of twelve 
or fourteen were racked, as were young mothers and 
women wdth child. Insanity, however, if recognized 
as genuine, was considered a bar to torture. 

Acquittal was almost, though not quite, unknown. 
Sometimes sentence was suspended and the accused 
discharged without formal exoneration. Very rarely 
acquittal by compurgation, that is by oath of the ac- 
cused supported by the oaths of a number of persons 
that they believed he was telling the truth, was allowed. 



414 THE COUNTEE-REFORMATION 

Practically the only plea open to the suspect was that 
the informers against him were actuated by malice. 
As he was not told who his accusers were this was dif- 
ficult for him to use. 
Penalties The penalties were various, including scourging, the 

galleys and perpetual imprisonment. Capital punish- 
ment by fire was pronounced not only on those who 
were impenitent but on those who, after having been 
once discharged, had relapsed. In Spain, heretics who 
recanted before execution were first strangled; the 
obstinately impenitent were burned alive. Persons 
convicted of heresy who could not be reached were 
burnt in effigy. 

Acting on the maxim ecclesia non sitit sanguinem the 
Inquisitors did not put their victims to death by their 
own officers but handed them over to the civil authori- 
ties for execution. With revolting hypocrisy they 
even adjured the hangmen to be merciful, well know- 
ing that the latter had no option but to carry out the 
sentence of the church. Magistrates who endeavored 
to exercise any discretion in favor of the condemned 
were promptly threatened with excommunication. 

If anything could be wanting to complete the horror 
it was supplied by the festive spirit of the executions. 
Auto da Fe The Auto da Fe, or act of faith, was a favorite spec- 
tacle of the Spaniards ; no holiday was quite complete 
without its holocaust of human victims. The staging 
was elaborate, and the ceremony as impressive as pos- 
sible. Secular and spiritual authorities were ordered 
to be present and vast crowds were edified by the hor- 
rible example of the untimely end of the unbeliever. 
Sundays and feast days were chosen for these spec- 
tacles and on gala occasions, such as royal weddings 
and christenings, a special effort was made to celebrate 
one of these holy butcheries. 

The number of victims has been variously estimated. 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 415 

An actual count up to the year 1540, that is, before 
Protestantism became a serious factor, shows that 
20,226 were burned in person and 10,913 in effigy, and 
these figures are incomplete. It must be remembered 
that for every one who paid the extreme penalty there 
Avere a large number of others punished in other ways, 
or imprisoned and tortured while on trial. AVhen 
Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards the pope, was Inquisi- 
tor General 1516-22, 1,620 persons were burned alive, 
560 in effigy and 21,845 were sentenced to penance or 
other lighter punishments. Roughly, for one person 
sentenced to death ten suffered milder penalties. 

Heresy was not the only crime punished by the In- Crimes 

quisition; it also took charge of blasphemy, bigamy. !L! 

and some forms of vice. In its early years it was 
chiefly directed against the Jews who, having been ^ 
forced to the baptismal font, had relapsed. Later the 
Moriscos or christened Moors supplied the largest ^ 
number of victims. As with the Jews, race hatred 
was so deep an ingredient of the treatment meted out 
to them that the nominal cause was sometimes forgot- 
ten, and baptism often failed to save ''the new Chris- 
tian" who preserved any, even the most innocent, of 
the national customs. Many a man and woman was 
tortured for not eating pork or for bathing in the 
Moorish fashion. 

As Protestantism never obtained any hold in Spain, 
the Inquisition had comparatively little trouble on that 
account. During the sixteenth century a total number 
of 1995 persons were punished as Protestants of whom 
1640 were foreigners and only 355 were Spaniards. 
Even these figures exaggerate the hold that the Re- 
formation had in Spain, for any error remotely re- 
sembling the tenets of Wittenberg immediately classed 
its maintainer as Lutheran. The first case kno^^Ti was 
found in Majorca in 1523, but it was not until 1559 



416 



THE COUNTER-REFOEMATION 



May 30, 
1541 



New 
World 



Roman In- 
quisition 



July 21, 
1542 



that any considerable number suffered for this faith. 
In that year 24 Lutherans were burnt at E-odrigo and 
Seville, 32 in 1562, and 19 Calvinists in 1569. 

The dread of the Spanish Inquisition was such that 
only in those dependencies early and completely sub- 
dued could it be introduced. Established in Sicily in 
1487 its temporal jurisdiction was suspended during 
the years 1535-46, when it was revived by the fear of 
Protestantism. Even during i^s dark quarter, how- 
ever, it was able to punish heretics.' In an auto cele- 
brated at Palermo, of the twenty-two culprits three 
were Lutherans and nineteen Jews. The capitulation 
of Naples in 1503 expressly excluded the Spanish In- 
quisition, nor could it be established in Milan. The 
Portuguese Inquisition was set up in 1536. 

The New World was capable of offering less re- 
sistance. Nevertheless, for many years the inquisitor- 
ial powers were vested in the bishops sent over to Mex- 
ico and Peru, and when the Inquisition was established 
in both countries in 1570 it probably meant no increase 
of severity. The natives were exempt from its juris- 
diction and it found little combustible material save 
in captured Protestant Europeans. A Fleming was 
burned at Lima in 1548, and at the first auto held at 
Mexico in 1574 thirty-six Lutherans were punished, 
all English captives, two by burning and the rest by 
scourging or the galleys. 

The same need of repelling Protestantism that 
had helped to give a new lease of life to the Spanish 
Inquisition called into being her sister the Roman 
Inquisition. By the bull Licet ab initio, Paul IV re- 
constituted the Holy Office at Rome, directing and em- 
powering it to smite all who persisted in condemned 
opinions lest others should be seduced by their ex- 
ample, not only in the papal states but in all the na- 
tions of Christendom. It was authorized to pronounce 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 417 

sentence on culprits and to invoke the aid of the secu- 
lar arm to punish them with prison, confiscation of 
goods and death. Its authority was directed particu- 
larly against persons of high estate, even against 
heretical princes whose subjects were loosed from their 
obligation of obedience and whose neighbors were in- 
vited to take away their heritage. 

The procedure of the Holy Office at Rome was char- Procedure 
acterized by the Augustinian Cardinal Seripando as at 
first lenient, but later, he continues, ''when the super- 
human rigor of Caraffa [one of the first Inquisitors 
General] held sway, the Inquisition acquired such a 
reputation that from no other judgment-seat on earth 
were more horrible and fearful sentences to be ex- 
pected." Besides the attention it paid to Protestants 
it instituted very severe processes against Judaizing 
Christians and took cognizance also of seduction, of 
jjimping, of sodomy, and of infringment of the eccle- 
siastical rules for fasting. 

The Roman Inquisition was introduced into Milan Italy 
by Michael Ghislieri, afterwards pope, and flourished 
mightily under the protecting care of Borromoo, car- 
dinal archbishop of the city. It was established by 
Charles V, notwithstanding opposition, in Naples. ^547 
Venice also fought against its introduction but never- 1544 
theless fmally permitted it. During the sixteenth cen- 
tury in that city there were no less than 803 processes 
for Lutheranism, 5 for Calvinism, 35 against Anabap- 
tists, 43 for Judaism and 199 for sorcery. In coun- 
tries outside of Italy the Roman Inquisition did not "^ 
take root. Bishop Magrath endeavored in 1567 to give 
Ireland the benefit of the institution, but naturally the 
English Government allowed no such thing. 

A method of suppressing given opinions and propa- ^^^JJ^^"'^^'^'^ 
gating others probably far more effective than the press 



418 THE COUNTEE-REFORMATION 

mauling of men's bodies is the guidance of their minds 
through direction of their reading and instruction. 
Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an 
illiterate society, the censorship of books would have 
slight importance. Plato was perhaps the first to pro- 
pose that the reading of immoral and impious books be 
forbidden, but I am not aware that his suggestion was 
acted upon either in the states of Greece or in pagan 
Rome. Examples of the rejection of certain books by 
the early church are not wanting. Paul induced the 
Ephesian sorcerers to burn their books ; certain fathers 
of the church advised against the reading of heathen 
C.496 authors; Pope Gelasius made a decree on the books 

received and those not received by the church, and 
JVIanichaean books were publicly burnt. 

The invention of printing brought to the attention 
of the church the danger of allowing her children to 
choose their own reading matter. The first to anim- 
advert upon it was Berthold, Archbishop of Mayence, 
the city of Gutenberg. On the 22d of March, 1485, he 
promulgated a decree to the effect that, whereas the 
divine art of printing had been abused for the sake of 
lucre and whereas by this means even Christ's books, 
missals and other works on religion, were thumbed by 
the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too 
poor to express such mysteries, and common persons 
too ignorant to understand them, therefore every work 
translated into German must be approved by the doc- 
tors of the university of Mayence before being pub- 
lished, 
junei "^^^ example of the prelate was soon followed by 

1501 , popes and councils. Alexander VI forbade as a de- 

y /testable evil the printing of books injurious to the 
I Catholic faith, and made all archbishops official cen- 
sors for their dioceses. This was enforced by a de- 
cree of the Fifth Lateran Council setting forth that 



Fourth 
century 

Printing 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 419 

although printing has brought much advantage to the May 4, 
church it has also disseminated errors and pernicious ^^^ 
dogmas contrary to the Christian religion. The decree 
forbids the printing of any book in any city or diocese 
of Christendom without license from the local bishop 
or other ecclesiastical authority. 

This sweeping edict was supplemented by others 
directed against certain books or authors, but for a 
whole generation the church left the censorship chiefly— ^ — 
to the discretion of the several national governments. 
This was the policy followed also by the Protestants, Protestant 
both at this time and later. Neither Luther, nor any Censorship 
other reformer for a long time attempted to draw up 
regular indices of prohibited books. Examples of 
something approaching this may be found in the later 
history of Protestantism, but they are so unimportant 
as to be negligible. 

The national goveraments, however, laid great stress National 
on licensing. The first law in Spain was followed by 1552*''^^ '^' 
an ever increasing strictness under the inquisitor who 
drew up several indices of prohibited books, completely 
independent of the official Roman lists. The German 
Diets and the French kings were careful to give their 
subjects the benefit of their selection of reading mat- 
ter. In England, too, lists of prohibited books were 
drawn up under all the Tudors. Mary restricted the 
right to print to licensed members of the Stationers* 
Company; Elizabeth put the matter in the hands of 
Star Chamber. A special license was required by the 1559 
Injunctions, and a later law was aimed at ''seditious, 
schismatic or libellous books and other fantastic writ- 1588 
ings. ' ' 

The idea of a complete catalogue of heretical and Catalogues 
dangerous writings under ecclesiastical censure took\ ° f"^"" 

'^ ° \ ous books 

its rise in the Netherlands. After the works of vari- ^^ 

ous authors had been severally prohibited in distinct 



420 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

proclamations, the University of Louvain, at the em- 
peror's command, drew up a fairly extensive list in 
1546 and again, somewhat enlarged, in 1550. It men- 
tions a number of Bibles in Greek, Latin and the ver- 
naculars, the works of Luther, Carlstadt, Osiander, 
Ochino, Bullinger, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Jonas, Cal- 
vin, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Huss and John Pupper of 
Goch, a Dutch author of the fifteenth century revived 
by the Protestants. It is remarkable that the works 
of Erasmus are not included in this list. Further- 
more it is stated that certain approved works, even 
when edited or translated by heretics, might be al- 
lowed to students. Among the various scientific works 
condemned are an Anatomy printed at Marburg by 
Eucharius Harzhom, H. C. Agrippa's De vanitate sci- 
entiarum, and Sebastian Miinster's Cosmo graphia uni- 
versalis, a geography printed in 1544. The Koran is 
prohibited, and also a work called "Het paradijs van 
Venus," this latter presumably as indecent. Finally, 
all books printed since 1525 without name of author, 
printer, time, and place, are prohibited. 

Roman Partly in imitation of this work of Louvain, partly 

Index jj-^ consequence of the foundation of the Inquisition, the 

Roman Index of Prohibited Books was promulgated. 
Though the bull founding the Roman Inquisition said 
nothing about books, their censure was included in 
practice. Under the influence of the Holy Ofiice at 
Lucca a list of forbidden works was drawn up by the 

1545 Senate at Lucca, including chiefly the tracts of Italian 

heretics and satires on the church. The fourth session 

^5^46^^' of the Council of Trent prohibited the printing of all 
anonymous books whatever and of all others on re- 
ligion until licensed. A further indication of increas- 

1550 jjig severity may be found in a bull issued by Julius III 

who complained that authors licensed to read heretical 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 421 

books for the pui'pose of refuting them were more 
likely to be seduced by them, and who therefore re- 
voked all licenses given up to that time. 

When the Roman Inquisition issued a long list of September, 
volumes to be burnt publicly, including works of Eras- ^^^^ 
mus, Machiavelli and Poggio, this might be considered 
the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books; but the 
first document to bear that name was issued by Paul 
IV. It divided writings into three classes : (1) Authors 1559 
who had erred ex professo and whose whole works were 
forbidden; (2) Authors who had erred occasionally and ' ^^ 
some of whose books only were mentioned; (3) Anony- -^ 
mous books. In addition to these classes 61 printers 
were named, all works published by whom were banned. 
The Index strove to be as complete as possible. Its 
chief though not its only source was the catalogue of 
Louvain. Many editions and versions of the Bible 
were listed and the printing of any translation with- 
out permission of the Inquisition was prohibited. 
Particular attention was paid to Erasmus, who was not 
only put in the first class by name but was signalized 
as having "all his commentaries, notes, annotations, 
dialogues, epistles, refutations, translations, books and 
writings" forbidden. 

The Council of Trent again took up the matter, pass- Tridentine 
ing a decree to the effect that inasmuch as heresy had censorship, 
not been cured by the censorship this should be made 26, 1562 
much stricter, and appointing a commission in order, 
as, regardless of the parable,^ it was phrased, to sep- 
arate the tares from the wheat. The persons ap- 
pointed for this delicate work comprised four arch- 
bishops, nine bishops, two generals of orders and some 
'* minor theologians." After much sweat they brought 
forth a report on most of the doubtful authors though 

1 Matthew xiii, 28-30. 



422 THE COUNTER-EEFORMATION 

the most difficult of all, Erasmus, they relinquished to 
the theological faculties of Louvain and Paris for ex- 
purgation. 
1564 The results of their labors were published by Paul 

IV under the name of the Tridentine Index. It was 
more sweeping, and at the same time more discrim- 
inating than the former Index. Erasmus was changed 
to the second class, only a portion of his works being 
now condemned. Among the non-ecclesiastical au- 
thors banned were Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Boc- 
caccio. It is noteworthy that the Decameron was ex- 
purgated not chiefly for its indecency but for its satire 
of ecclesiastics. Thus, a tale of the seduction of an 
abbess is rendered acceptable by changing the abbess 
into a countess ; the story of how a priest led a woman 
astray by impersonating the angel Gabriel is merely 
changed by making the priest a layman masquerading; 
as a fairy king. 

The principles upon which the prohibition of books 
rested were set forth in ten rules. The most interest- 
ing are the following: (1) Books printed before 1515 
condemned by popes or council; (2) Versions of the 
Bible; (3) books of heretics; (4) obscene books; (5) 
works on witchcraft and necromancy. 

In order to keep the Index up to date continual re- 
vision was necessary. To insure this Pius V ap- 
pointed a special Congregation of the Index, which has 
lasted until the present day. From his time to ours 
more than forty Indices have been issued. Those of 
the sixteenth century were concerned mainly with Prot- 
estant books, those of later centuries chiefly deal, for 
the purposes of internal discipline, with books written 
by Catholics. One of the functions of the Congrega- 
tion was to expurgate books, taking out the offensive 
passages. A separate Index expurgatorius, pointing 
out the passages to be deleted or corrected was pub- 



THE INQUISITION AND INDEX 423 

lishcd, and this name has sometimes incorrectly been 
applied to the Index of prohibited books. 

The effect of the censorship of the press has been Effect of the 
variously estimated. The Index was early dubbed ^^"^"'•ship 
sica destricta in omnes scriptores and Sarpi called it 
*'the finest secret ever discovered for applying re- 
ligion to the purpose of making men idiotic." Milton 
thundered against the censorship in England as ''the 
greatest discouragement and affront that can be of- 
fered to learning and learned men." The evil of the 
system of Rome was, in his opinion, double, for, as he 
wrote in his immortal Areopagitica, ''The Council of 
Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering to- 
gether brought forth and perfected those catalogues 
and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails 
of many an old good author with a violation worse 
than any that could be offered to his tomb." When 
we remember that the greatest w^orks of literature, 
such as the Divine Comedy, were tampered with, and 
that, in the Spanish Expurgatorial Index of 1640 the 
list of passages to be deleted or to be altered in Eras- 
mus ^s works takes 59 double-columned, closely printed 
folio pages, we can easily see the point of Milton's in- 
dignant protest. But, to his mind, it was still worse 
to subject a book to the examination of unfit men be- 
fore it could secure its imprimatur. Not without rea- 
son has liberty of the press been made one of the cor- 
nerstones of the temple of freedom. 

Various writers have labored to demonstrate the ^ 
blighting effect that the censorship was supposed to 
have on literature. But it is surprising how few ex- 
amples they can bring. Lea, who ought to know the 
Spanish field exhaustively, can only point to a few 
professors of theology who were persecuted and 
silenced for expressing unconventional views on bib- 
lical criticism. He conjectures that others must have 



424 THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 

remained mute through fear. But, as the golden age 
of Spanish literature came after the law made the 
1558 printing of unlicensed books punishable by death, it is 

hard to see wherein literature can have suffered. The 
Roman Inquisition did not prevent the appearance of 
Galileo's work, though it made him recant afterwards. 
The strict English law that playwrights should not 
''meddle with matters of divinity or state'* made 
Shakespeare careful not to express his religious and 
political views, but it is hard to see in what way it 
hampered his genius. 

And yet the influence of the various press laws was 
incalculably great and was just what it was intended 
to be. It affected science less than one would think, 
and literature hardly at all, but it moulded the opinions 
of the masses like putty in their rulers' hands. That 
the rank and file of Spaniards and Italians remained 
Catholic, and the vast majority of Britons Protestant, 
was due more to the bondage of the press than to any 
other one cause. Originality was discouraged, the 
/ people to some degree unfitted for the free debate that 
is at the bottom of self-government, the hope of tol- 
erance blighted, and the path opened that led to reli- 
gious wars. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE 
EXPANSION OF EUROPE 

§ 1. Spain 
If, through the prism of history, we analyse the Reforma- 
white light of sixteenth-century civilization into its nabsance 
component parts, three colors particularly emerge: andEx- 
the azure ''light of the Gospel" as the Reformers p^«"''«" 
fondly called it in Germany, the golden beam of the 
Renaissance in Italy, and the blood-red flame of ex- 
ploration and conquest irradiating the Iberian penin- 
sula. Which of the three contributed most to modern 
culture it is hard to decide. Each of the movements 
started separately, gradually spreading until it came 
into contact, and thus into competition and final blend- 
ing with the other movements. It was the middle 
lands, France, England and the Netherlands that, feel- 
ing the impulses from all sides, evolved the sanest and 
strongest synthesis. While Germany almost com- 
mitted suicide with the sword of the spirit, while Italy 
sank into a voluptuous torpor of decadent art, while 
Spain reeled under the load of unearned Western 
wealth, France, England and Holland, taking a little 
from each of their neighbors, and not too much from 
any, became strong, well-balanced, brilliant states. 
But if eventually Germany, Italy and Spain all suffered 
from over-specialization, for the moment the stimulus 
of new ideas and new possibilities gave to each a sort of 
leadership in its own sphere. While Germany and 
Italy were busy winning the realms of the spirit and 
of the mind, Spain very nearly conquered the empire 
of the land and of the sea. 

425 



426 



THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 



Ferdinand, 
1479-1516 
and Isa- 
bella, 1474- 
1504 



1492 



Francis 
Ximenez de 
Cisneros, 
1436-1517 



Charles V, 
1516-56 



The foundation of her national greatness, like that 
of the greatness of so many other powers, was laid in 
the union of the various states into which she was at 
one time divided. The marriage of Ferdinand of 
Aragon and Isabella of Castile was followed by a series 
of measures that put Spain into the leading position 
in Europe, expelled the alien racial and religious ele- 
ments of her population, and secured to her a vast 
colonial empire. The conquest of Granada from the 
Moors, the acquisition of Cerdagne and Eoussillon 
from the French, and the annexation of Naples, dou- 
bled the dominions of the Lions and Castles, and 
started the proud land on the road to empire. It is 
true that eventually Spain exhausted herself by tiy- 
ing to do more than even her young powers could ac- 
complish, but for a while she retained the hegemony 
of Christendom. The same year that saw the discov- 
er}^ of America and the occupation of the Alhambra, 
was also marked by the expulsion or forced conversion 
of the Jews, of whom 165,000 left the kingdom, 50,000 
were baptized, and 20,000 perished in race riots. The 
statesmanship of Ferdinand showed itself in a more 
favorable light in the measures taken to reduce the 
nobles, feudal anarchs as they were, to fear of the 
law. To take their place in the government of the 
country he developed a new bureaucracy, which also, to 
some extent, usurped the powers of the Cortes of Ara- 
gon and of the Cortes of Castile. In the meantime a 
notable reform of the church, in morals and in learning 
if not in doctrine, was carried through by the great 
Cardinal Ximenez. 

When Charles, the grandson of the Catholic Kings, 
succeeded Ferdinand he was already, through his fa- 
ther, the Archduke Philip, the lord of Burgundy and 
of the Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His elec- 
tion as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the 



SPAIN 427 

greatest prince of Christendom. To his gigantic task 
he brought all the redeeming qualities of dullness, for 
his mediocrity and moderation served his peoples and 
his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless 
ambition would have done. ''Never," he Is reported 
to have said in 1556, ''did I aspire to universal mon- 
archy, although it seemed well within my power to at- 
tain it." Though the long war with France turned 
ever, until the very last, in his favor, he never pressed 
his advantage to the point of crushing his enemy to 
earth. But in Germany and Italy, no less than in 
Spain and the Netherlands, he finally attained some- 
thing more than hegemony and something less than 
absolute power. 

Though Spain benefited by his world power and be- J^^J^^^ ^^ 
came the capital state of his far flung empire, ' ' Charles Communes 
of Ghent," as he was called, did not at first find Spani- 
ards docile subjects. Within a very few years of his j 
accession a great revolt, or rather two great synchron- I 
ous revolts, one in Castile and one in Aragon, flared up. 
The grievances in Castile were partly economic, the 
servicio (a tax) and the removal of money from the 
realm, and partly national as against a strange king 
and his foreign officers. Not only the regent, Adrian 
of Utrecht, but many important officials were north- 
erners, and when Charles left Spain to be croMiied cm- ^^^q 
peror, the national pride could no longer bear the hu- 
miliation of playing a subordinate part. The revolt 
of the Castilian Conmiunes began with the gentry and 
spread from them to the lower classes. Even the 
grandees joined forces with the rebels, though more 
from fear than from sympathy. The various revolt- 
ing communes formed a central council, the Santa 
Junta, and put forth a program re-asserting the rights 
of the Cortes to redress grievances. Meeting for a 
time with no resistance, the rebellion disintegrated 



428 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

through the operation of its own centrifugal forces, 
disunion and lack of leadership. So at length when 
the government, supplied with a small force of Ger- 
man mercenaries, struck on the field of Villalar, the 
April, 1521 rebels suffered a severe defeat. A few cities held out 
longer, Toledo last of all ; but one by one they yielded, 
partly to force, partly to the wise policy of concession 
and redress followed by the government. 

In our own time Barcelona and the east coast of 
Spain has been the hotbed of revolutionary democracy 
and radical socialism. Even so, the rising in Aragon 
The Her- /knowu as the Hermandad (Brotherhood) contempo- 
mandad / j-^ry with that in Castile, not only began earlier and 
' lasted longer, but was of a far more radical stamp. 
Here were no nobles airing their slights at the hands 
of a foreign king, but here the trade-gilds rose in the 
name of equality against monarch and nobles alike. 
Two special causes fanned the fury of the populace to 
a white heat. The first was the decline of the Medi- 
terranean trade due to the rise of the Atlantic com- 
merce ; the other was the racial element. Valencia was 
largely inhabited by Moors, the most industrious, sober 
and thrifty, and consequently the most profitable of 
Spanish laborers. The race hatred so deeply rooted 
in human nature added to the ferocity of the class 
conflict. Both sides were ruined by the war which, 
beginning in 1519, dragged along for several years 
until the proletariat was completely crushed. 
The Cortes Tj^g armed triumph of the government hardly dam- 
aged popular liberties as embodied in the constitution 
of the Cortes of Castile. When Charles became king 
this body was not, like other parliaments, ordinarily a 
representative assembly of the three estates, but con- 
sisted merely of deputies of eighteen Castilian cities. 
Only on special occasions, such as a coronation, were 
nobles and clergy summoned to participate, Its great 



SPAIN 429 

power was that of granting taxes, though somehow it 
never succeeded, as did the English House of Com- 
mons, in making the redress of grievances conditional 
upon a subsidy. But yet the power amounted to some- 
thing and it was one that neither Charles nor Philip 
commonly ventured to violate. Under both of them 
meetings of the Cortes were frequent. 

Though never directly attacked, the powers of the 
Cortes declined through the growth of vast interests 
outside their competence. The direction of foreign 
policy, so absorbing under Charles, and the charge of 
the enormous and growing commercial interests, was 
confided not to the representatives of the people, but 
to the Royal Council of Castile, an appointative body 
of nine la^v^^ers, three nobles, and one bishop. Though 
not absolutely, yet relatively, the functions of the 
Cortes diminished until they amounted to no more than 
those of a provincial council. 

What reconciled the people to the concentration of 
new powers in the hands of an irresponsible council 
was the apparently dazzling success of Spanish policy 
throughout the greater part of the sixteenth centur3\ 
No banner was served like that of the Lions and Cas- 
tles; no troops in the world could stand against her 
famous regiments; no generals were equal to Cortez 
and Alva ; no statesmen abler than Parma, no admirals, 
until the Armada, more daring than Magellan ^ and 
Don John, no champions of the church against heretic 
and infidel like Loyola and Xavier. 

That such an empire as the world had not seen since The 
Rome should within a single life-time rise to its zenith ^^^^^^ 
and, within a much shorter time, decline to the verge of 
ruin, is one of the melodramas of history. Perhaps, 
in reality, Spain was never quite so great as she looked, 
nor was her fall quite so complete as it seemed. But 

1 A Portuguese in Spanish service. 



430 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

the phenomena, such as they are, sufficiently call for 
explanation. 

First of all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might 
almost say, unnatural, character of the Hapsburg em- 
pire. While the union of Castile and Aragon, bring- 
ing together neighboring peoples and filling a political 
need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent 
accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories 
rather detracted from than added to the effective 
power of the Spanish state. Philip would have been 
far stronger had his father separated from his crown 
not only Austria and the Holy Roman Empire of Ger- 
many, but the Netherlands as well. The revolt of the 
Dutch Republic was in itself almost enough to ruin 
Spain. Nor can it be said that the Italian states, won 
by the sword of Ferdinand or of Charles, were valuable 
accessions to Spanish power. 
Colonies Quitc different in its nature was the colonial em- 

pire, but in this it resembled the other windfalls to the 
house of Hapsburg in that it was an almost accidental, 
unsought-for acquisition. The Genoese sailor who 
went to the various courts of Europe begging for a 
few ships in which to break the watery path to Asia, 
had in his beggar's wallet all the kingdoms of a new 
world and the glory of them. For a few years Spain 
drank until she was drunken of conquest and the gold 
of America. That the draught acted momentarily as 
/ a stimulant, clearing her brain and nerving her arm to 
deeds of valor, but that she suffered in the end from 
the riotous debauch, cannot be doubted. She soon 
learned that all that glittered was not wealth, and that 
industries surfeited with metal and starved of raw ma- 
terials must perish. The unearned coin proved to be 
fairy gold in her coffers, turning to bro^\ai leaves and 
dust when she wanted to use it. It became a drug in 
her markets ; it could not lawfully be exported, and no 



SPAIN 431 

amount of it would purchase much honest labor from 
an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth. 
The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun 
never set, was cursed with a singular and to him in- 
explicable need of everything that money was supposed 
to buy. His armies mutinied, his ships rotted, and 
never could his increasing income catch up with the far 
more rapidly increasing expenses of his budget. 

The poverty of the people w^as in large part the 
fault of the government which pursued a fiscal policy 
ideally calculated to strike at the very sources of 
w^ealth. While, under the oppression of an ignorant 
paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, CL.c ( 
she was tended by a physician who tried to cure her 
malady by phlebotomy. There have been worse men 
than Philip II, but there have been hardly any who Philip ii, 
have caused more blood to flow from the veins of their 1556-98 
own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning 
bigot can do more harm than the most abandoned de- 
bauchee. '*I would rather lose all my kingdoms," he 
averred, ''than allow freedom of religion." And 
again, to a man condemned by the Inquisition for 
heresy, *'If my own son were as perverse as you, I 
myself would carry the faggot to buni him." Con- 
sistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or 
any horror, he pursued his aim. He was not afraid 
of hard work, scribbling reams of minute directions 
daily to his ofBcers. His stubborn calm was imper- 
turbable; he took his pleasures — women, autos-da-fe 
and victories — sadly, and he suffered such chagrins as 
the death of four "svives, having a monstrosity for a 
son, and the loss of the Armada and of the Nether- 
lands, without turning a hair. 

Spain's foreign policy came to bo more and more 
polarized by the rise of English sea-power. Even 
under Charles, when France had been the chief enemy, 



432 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

Spain rs. the Hapsburgs saw the desirability of winning Eng- 
England l^n^ as a strategic point for their universal empire. 
This policy was pursued by alternating alliance with 
hostility. For six years of his boyhood Charles had 
been betrothed to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII 's sister, 
to whom he sent a ring inscribed, ''Mary hath chosen 
the better part which shall not be taken away from 
her." His own precious person, however, was taken 
from her to be bestowed on Isabella of Portugal, by 
whom he begot Philip. When this son succeeded him, 
notwithstanding the little unpleasantness of Henry 
VIII 's divorce, he advised him to turn again to an 
English marriage, and Philip soon became the hus- 
band of Queen Mary. After her death without issue, 
he vainly wooed her sister, until he was gradually 
forced by her Protestant buccaneers into an undesired 
war. 

Notwithstanding all that he could do to lose for- 
tune's favors, she continued for many years to smile 
on her darling Hapsburg. After a naval disaster in- 
flicted by the Turks on the Spaniard off the coast of 
Tripoli, the defeated power recovered and revenged 
herself in the great naval victory of Lepanto, in Oc- 
tober 1571. The lustre added to the Lions and Castles 
by this important success was far outshone by the ac- 
quisition of Portugal and all her colonies, in 1581. 
Though not the nearest heir, Philip was the strongest, 
f and by bribery and menaces won the homage of the 

Portuguese nobles after the death of the aged king 
Henry on Januarj^ 31, 1580. For sixty years Spain 
held the lesser country and, what was more important 
to her, the colonies in the East Indies and in Africa. 

j So vast an empire had not yet been heard of, or im- 

agined possible, in the history of the world. No won- 

i der that its shimmer dazzled the eyes not only of con- 

\^ temporaries, but of posterity. According to Macaulay, 



SPAIN 433 

Philip's power was equal to that of Napoleon, and its 
ruin is the most instructive lesson in history of how not 
to govern. 

How hollow was this semblance of might was dem- 
onstrated by the first stalwart peoples that dared to 
test it, first by the Dutch and then by England. The 
story of the Armada has already been told. Its prep- 
aration marked the height of Philip's effort and the 
height of his incompetence. Its annihilation was a 
cruel blow to his pride. But in Spain, barring a tem- 
porary financial panic, things went much the same 
after 1588 as before it. The full bloom of Spanish 
culture, gorgeous with Velasquez and fragrant with 
Cervantes and Calderon, followed hard upon the de- 
feat of the Armada. 

The fact is that Spain suffered much more from in- Y^^J''*^ 
ternal disorders than from foreign le^^y. The chief 
occasion of her troubles was the presence among her 
people of a large body of Moors, hated both for their 
race and for their religion. With the capitulation of 
Granada, the enjoyment of Mohammedanism was 
guaranteed to the Moors, but this tolerance only lasted 
for six years, when a decree went out that all must be 
baptized or must emigrate from Andalusia. In Ara- 
gon, however, always independent of Castile, they con- 
tinued to enjoy religious freedom. Charles at his 
coronation took a solemn oath to respect the faith of 
Islam in these lands, but soon afterwards, frightened 
by the rise of heresy in Germany, he applied to Clem- 
ent to absolve him from his oath. This sanction of 
bad faith, at first creditably withhold, was finally 
granted and was promptly followed by a general order 
for expulsion or conversion. Throughout the whole 
of Spain the poor Moriscos now began to be systemat- 
ically pillaged and persecuted b}' whoever chose to do 
it. All manner of taxes, tithes, servitudes and fines 



1524 



^34 



THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 



were demanded of them. The last straw that broke 
the endurance of a people tried by every manner of 
tyranny and extortion, was an edict ordering all 
Moors to learn Castilian within three years, after 
which the use of Arabic was to be forbidden, prohibit- 
ing all Moorish customs and costumes, and strictly en- 
joining attendance at church. 

As the Moors had been previously disarmed and as 
they had no military discipline, rebellion seemed a 
counsel of despair, but it ensued. The populace rose 
in helpless fury, and for three years defied the might 
of the Spanish empire. But the result could not be 
doubtful. A naked peasantry could not withstand the 
disciplined battalions that had proved their valor on 
every field from Mexico to the Levant and from Saxony 
to Algiers. It was not a war but a massacre and pil- 
lage. The whole of Andalusia, the most flourishing 
province in Spain, beautiful with its snowy mountains, 
fertile with its tilled valleys, and sweet with the peace- 
ful toil of human habitation, was swept by a universal 
storm of carnage and of flame. The young men either 
perished in fighting against fearful odds, or were 
slaughtered after yielding as prisoners. Those who 
sought to fly to Africa found the avenues of escape 
blocked by the pitiless Toledo blades. The aged were 
hunted down like wild beasts; the women and young 
children were sold into slavery, to toil under the lash 
or to share the hated bed of the conqueror. The mas- 
sacre cost Spain 60,000 lives and three million ducats, 
not to speak of the harm that it did to her spirit. 



Division 
of the 

New World 
between 
Spain and 
Portugal 



§ 2. Exploration 

When Columbus returned with gloAving accounts of 
the ''India" he had found, the value of his work was 
at once appreciated. Forthwith began that struggle 
for colonial power which has absorbed so much of the 



EXPLORATION 435 

energies of the European nations. In view of the Por- 
tiigneso discoveries in Africa, it was felt necessary 
to mark out the ^'sphei-es of influence" of the two pow- 
ers at once, and, with an instinctive appeal to the one 
authority claiming to be international, the Spanish 
government immediately applied to Pope Alexander 
VI for confirmation in the new-found territories. Act- 
ing on the suggestion of Columbus that the line of 
Spanish influence be dra\\Ti one hundred leagues west 
of any of the Cape Verde Islands or of the Azores, 
the pope, with magnificent self-assurance, issued a May 4, 

• • 14Q3 

bull. Inter caetera divinae, of his own mere liberality 
and in virtue of the authority of Peter, conferring on 
Castile forever ''all dominions, camps, posts, and vil- 
lages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining 
to them, ' ' west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal 
all that fell to the east of it. Portugal promptly pro- 
tested that the line was too far east, and by the treaty 
of Tordesillas, it was moved to 370 leagues west of 
the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th 
and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was 
doubtless to confer on Spain all land immediately west 
of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of fact. South America 
thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of her 
territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Por- 
tugal. 

Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, yg^nturers 
During the next century hundreds of ships carried tens 
of thousands of adventurers to seek their fortune in 
the west. For it was not as colonists that most of 
them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the 
crusader, the knight-errant, and the pirate. If there 
is anything in the paradox that artists have created 
natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that the Span- 
ish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. 
The men who sailed on the great adventure had feasted 



43G THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

on tales of paladins and hippogrifs, of enchanted pal- 
aces and fountains of youth, and miraculously fair 
women to be rescued and then claimed by knights. 
They read in books of travel purporting to tell the 
sober truth of satyrs and of purple unicorns and 
of men who spread their feet over their heads for 
umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between 
their shoulders. No wonder that when they went to 
a strange country they found the River of Life in the 
Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the jungle, and El 
Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and 
Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of 
Europe, as well as to the power of the pen, that the 
whole continent came to be called, not after its dis- 
coverer, but after the man who wrote the best ro- 
mances — mosth^ fictions — about his travels in it. 
Expioita- In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first 

*"'"'' colonies, her rule showed at its worst. The soft na- 

n ?i 1 1 VPS ' 

tive race, the Caribs, almost completely disappeared 
within half a century. The best modern authority 
estimates that whereas the native population of Es- 
panola (Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 
1493, by 1548 hardly 5000 Indians were left. In part 
the extinction of the natives was due to new diseases 
and to the vices of civilization, but far more to the 
heartless exploitation of them by the conquerors. Bar- 
tholomew de las Casas, the first priest to come to this 
unfortunate island, tells stories of Spanish cruelty 
that would be incredible were they not so well sup- 
ported. With his own eyes he saw 3000 inoffensive 
Indians slaughtered at a single time ; of another batch 
of 300 he observed that within a few months more 
than half perished at hard labor. Again, he saw 6000 
Indian children condemned to work in the mines, of 
whom few or none long survived. In vain a bull of 
Paul III declared the Indians capable of becoming 



natives 



/ 



EXPLORATION '437 

Christians and forbade their enslavement. In vain 
the Spanish government tried to mitigate at least some 1537 
of the hardships of the natives* lot, ordering that they 
should be well fed and paid. The temptation to ex- 
ploit them was too strong; and when they perished the 
Spaniards supplied their place by importing negroes 
from Africa, a people of tougher fibre. 

Spanish exploration, followed by sparse settlement, 
soon opened up the greater part of the Americas south 
of the latitude of the present city of San Francisco. 
Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness, 
only a few were financially repaying; the majority 
were a drain on the resources of the mother country. 
In every place where the Spaniard set foot the native 
quailed and, after at most one desperate struggle, went 
(lo^\^l, never again to loose the conqueror's grip from 
his throat or to move the conqueror's knee from his 
chest. Even the bravest were as helpless as children 
before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon 
unkno^VIl monsters. 

But in no place, save in the islands, did the native 
races wholly disappear as they did in the English set- 
tlements. The Spaniards came not like the Puritans, 
as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on founding 
new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a 
race of helots to toil for them. For a period anarchy 
reigned; the captains not only plundered the Indians 
but fought one another fiercely for more room — more 
room in the endless wilderness ! Eventually, however, 
conditions became more stable ; Spain imposed her ef- 
fective control, her language, religion and institutions 
on a vast region, doing for South America what Rome 
had once done for her. 

The lover of adventure will find rich reward in trac- 
ing the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, of 
Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the whole course of 



438 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from Peru, 
or in reading of Balboa, ''when with eagle eyes he 
stared at the Pacific/' A resolute man could hardly 
set out exploring without stumbling upon some mighty 
river, some vast continent, or some unmeasured ocean. 
But among all these fairly-tales there are some that are 
so marvellous that they would be thought too extrava- 
gant by the most daring writers of romance. That one 
captain with four hundred men, and another with two 
hundred, should each march against an extensive and 
populous empire, cut down their armies at odds of a 
hundred to one, put their kings to the sword and their 
temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of 
gold and precious stones such as for quantity had never 
been heard of before — all this meets us not in the tales 
of Ariosto or of Dumas, but in the pages of authentic 
history. 
Conquest of In the tableland of Mexico dwelt the Aztecs, the most 
civilized and warlike of North American aborigines. 
Their polity was that of a Spartan military despotism, 
their religion the most grewsome known to man. Be- 
fore their temples were piled pyramids of human 
skulls; the deities were placated by human sacrifice, 
and at times, according to the deicidal and theophagous 
rites common to many primitive superstitions, them- 
selves sacrificed in effigy or in the person of a beau- 
tiful captive and their flesh eaten in sacramental can- 
nibalism. Though the civilization of the Aztecs, de- 
rived from the earlier and perhaps more advanced Ma- 
yans, was scarcely so high as that of the ancient Egyp- 
tians, they had cultivated the arts sufficiently to work 
the mines of gold and silver and to hammer the pre- 
cious metals into elaborate and massive ornaments. 

When rumors of their wealth reached Cuba it seemed 
at last as if the dream of El Dorado had come true. 
Hernando Cortez, a cultured, resolute, brave and pol- 



Mexico 



EXPLORATION 439 

itic leader, gathered a force of four hundred white 
men, with a small outfit of artillery and cavalry, and, 
on Good Friday, 1519, landed at the place now called 
Vera Cruz and marched on the capital. The race of 
warriors who delighted in nothing but slaughter, was 
stupefied, partly by an old prophecy of the coming of 
a god to subdue the land, partly by the strange and 
terrible arms of the invaders. Moreover their neigh- 
bors and subjects were ready to rise against them and 
become allies of the Spaniards. In a few months of 
crowded battle and massacre they lay broken and help- 
less at the feet of the audacious conqueror, who 
promptly sent to Spain a glowing account of his new 
empire and a tribute of gold and silver. Albert Diirer 
in August, 1520, saw at Brussels the ''things brought 
the king from the new golden land," and describes 
them in his diary as including ''a whole golden sun, 
a fathom in breadth, and a whole silver moon of the 
same size, and two rooms full of the same sort of ar- 
mour, and also all kinds of weapons, accoutrements and 
bows, wonderful shields . . . altogether valued at a 
hundred thousand gulden. And all my life," he adds, 
''I have never seen anything that so rejoiced my heart 
as did these things." 

If an artist, familiar with kings and courts and the Conquest of 
greatest marts of Europe could w^rite thus, w^hat won- 
der that the imagination of the world took fire? The 
golden sun and the silver moon were, to all men who 
saw them, like Helen's breasts, the sun and moon of 
heart's desire, to lure them over the western waves. 
Twelve years after Cortez, came Pizarro who, ^\dth a 
still smaller force conquered an even wealthier and 
more civilized empire. The Incas, unlike the Mexi- 
cans, were a mild race, living in a sort of theocratic 
socialism, in which the emperor, as god, exercised 
absolute power over his subjects and in return cared 



^0 



THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 



Circumnav- 
igation of 
the globe, 
1519-22 



September 
20, 1519 

October 21, 
1520 



1521 



for at least their common wants. The Spaniards out- 
did themselves in acts of treachery and blood. In vain 
the emperor, Atahualpa, after voluntarily placing him- 
self in the hands of Pizarro, filled the room used as 
his prison nine feet high with gold as ransom; when 
he could give no more he was tried on the preposterous 
charges of treason to Charles V and of heresy, and 
suffered death at the stake. Pizarro coolly pocketed 
the till then undreamed of sum of 4,500,000 ducats,^ 
worth in our standards more than one hundred million 
dollars. 

But the crowning act of the age of discovery was the 
circumnavigation of the globe. The leader of the great 
enterprise that put the seal of man's dominion on the 
earth, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in Span- 
ish service. With a fleet of five vessels, only one of 
which put a ring around the world, and with a crew of 
about 275 men of whom only 18 returned successful, 
ho sailed from Europe. Coasting down the east of 
South America, exploring the inlets and rivers, he 
entered the straits that bear his name and covered 
their 360 miles in thirty-eight days. After following 
the coast up some distance north, he struck across the 
Pacific, the breadth of which he much underestimated. 
For ninety-eight days he was driven by the east trade- 
wind without once sighting land save two desert 
islands, while his crew endured extremities of hunger, 
thirst and scurvy. At last he came to the islands he 
called, after the thievish propensities of their inhab- 
itants, the Ladrones, making his first landing at Guam. 
Spending but three days here to refit and provision, 
he sailed again on March 9, and a week later discov- 
ered the islands known, since 1542, as the Philippines. 

1 Allowing $2.40 to a ducat this would be $10,800,000 intrinsically 
at a time when money had ten times the purchasing power that it has 
today. 



EXPLORATION 441 

In an expedition against a savage chief the great leader ■ 

met his deatli on April 27, 1521. As other sailors and 

as he, too, had previously been as far to the east as 

he now found himself, he had practically completed 

the circumnavigation of the globe. The most splendid 

triumph of the age of discovery coincided almost to a 

day with the time that Luther was achieving the most 

glorious deed of the Reformation at Worms. 

Magellan's ship, the Vittoria, proceeded under Se- September, 
bastian del Cano, and finally, with thirty-one men, of 
whom only eighteen had started out in her, came back 
to Portugal. The men who had burst asunder one of 
the bonds of the older world, were, nevertheless, deeply 
troubled by a strange, medieval scruple. Having mys- 
teriously lost a day by following the sun in his west- 
ward course, they did penance for having celebrated 
the fasts and feasts of the church on the ^vrong dates. 

While Spain was extending her dominions westward, Portugese 

T 1 7^ 1 1 -1 T ' i • Exploration 

little Portugal was building up an even greater empire 
in both hemispheres. In the fifteenth century, this 
hardy people, confined to their coast and without possi- 
bility of expanding inwards, had seen that their fu- 
ture lay upon the water. To the possessor of sea 
power the ocean makes of every land bordering on it 
a frontier, vulnerable to them and impeiwious to the 
enemy. The first ventures of the Portuguese were 
naturally in the lands near by, the North African coast 
and the islands knoAVTi as the Madeiras and the Azores. 
Feeling their way southward along the African coast 
they reached the Cape of Good Hope but did not at 
once go much further. This path to India was not ]^°^ 
broken until eleven years later, when Vasco da Gama, 
after a voyage of great daring — he was ninety-three 1497-8 
days at sea on a course of 4500 miles from the Cape 
Verde Islands to South Africa — reached Calicut on 
May 20, 1498. This city, now sunken in the sea, was 



442 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 

then the most flourishing port on the Malabar Coast, 
exploited entirely by Mohammedan traders. Spices 
had long been the staple of Venetian trade with the 
Orient, and when he returned with rich cargo of them 
the immediate effect upon Europe was greater than 
that of the voyage of Columbus. Trade seeks to follow 
the line of least resistance, and the establishment of a 
water way between Europe and the East was like con- 
necting two electrically charged bodies in a Leyden jar 
by a copper wire. The current was no longer forced 
through a poor medium, but ran easily through the bet- 
ter conductor. With more rapiditj^ than one would 
think possible in that age, the commercial consequences 
of the discovery were appreciated. The trade of the 
Levant died away, and the center of gravity was trans- 
ferred from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. While 
Venice decayed Lisbon rose with mushroom speed to 
the position of the great emporium of European ocean- 
borne trade, until she in her turn was supplanted by 
Antwerp. 

1500 Da Gama was soon imitated by others. Cabral made 

commercial settlements at Calicut and the neighboring 
town of Cochin, and came home with unheard-of riches 

1503 in spice, pearls and gems. Da Gama returned and 

bombarded Calicut, and Francis d 'Almeida was made 

1505 Governor of India and tried to consolidate the Portu- 

guese power there on the correct principle that who 
was lord of the sea was lord of the peninsula. The 
rough methods of the Portuguese and their competi- 
tion with the Arab traders made war inevitable be- 
tween the two rivals. To the other causes of enmity 
that of religion was added, for, like the Spaniards, the 
Portuguese tried to combine the characters of mer- 
chants and missionaries, of pirates and crusaders. 
When the first of Da Gama's sailors to land at Calicut 
was asked what he sought, his laconic answer, ''Chris- 



EXPLORATION 443 

tians and spices," had in it as much of truth as of 
epigrammatic neatness. 

Had the Portuguese but treated the Hindoos hu- Portugese 
manely they would have found in them allies against J^j-^'^g^'' 
the Mohammedan traders, but all of them, not except- 
ing their greatest statesman, Alphonso d 'Albuquerque, 
pursued a policy of frightfulness. When Da Gama 
met an Arab ship, after sacking it, he blew it up with 
gunpowder and left it to sink in flames while the women 
on board held up their babies with piteous cries to 
touch the heart of this knight of Christ and of mam- 
mon. Without the least compunction Albuquerque 
tells in his commentaries how he burned the Indian vil- 
lages, put part of their inhabitants to death and or- 
dered the noses and ears of the survivors cut off. 

Nevertheless, the Portuguese got what they wanted, Trade 
the wealthy trade of the East. Albuquerque, failing 
to storm Calicut, seized Goa farther north and made it 
the chief emporium. But they soon felt the need of 
stations farther east, for, as long as the Arabs held 
Malacca, where spices were cheaper, the intruders did 
not have the monopoly they desired. Accordingly Al- 
buquerque seized this city on the Malay Straits, which, isii 
though now it has sunk into insignificance, was then the 
Singapore or Hong-Kong of the Far East. Sumatra, 
Java and the northern coast of Australia were ex- 
plored, the Moluccas were bought from Spain for 350,- 
000 ducats, and even Japan and China were reached by 
the daring traders. In the meantime posts were es- 
tablished along the whole western and eastern coasts 
of Africa and in Madagascar. But wherever they went 
the Portuguese sought commercial advantage not per- / 
manent settlement. Aptly compared by a Chinese ob- 
server to fishes who died if taken from the sea, they 
founded an empire of vast length out of incredible 
thinness. 



444 



THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 



Brazil 



Decadence 
of Portugal 



The one exception to this rule, and an important one, 
was Brazil. The least sho^^^ of the colonies and the 
one that brought in the least quick profit eventually 
became a second and a greater Portugal, outstripping 
the mother country in population and dividing South 
America almost equally with the Spanish. In many 
ways the settlement of this colony resembled that 
of North America by the English more than it did 
the violent and superficial conquests of Spain. Set- 
tlers came to it less as adventurers than as home- 
seekers and some of them fled from religious persecu- 
tion. The great source of wealth, the sugar-cane, was 
introduced from Madeira in 1548 and in the following 
year the mother country sent a royal governor and 
some troops. 

But even more than Spain Portugal overtaxed her 
strength in her grasp for sudden riches. The cup that 
her mariners took from the gorgeous Eastern en- 
chantress had a subtle, transforming drug mingled 
with its spices, whereby they were metamorphosed, if 
not into animals, at least into orientals, or Africans. 
While Lisbon grew by leaps and bounds the country- 
side was denuded, and the landowners, to fill the places 
of the peasants who had become sailors, imported 
quantities of negro slaves. Thus not only the Por- 
tuguese abroad, but those at home, undeterred by ra- 
cial antipathy, adulterated their blood with that of 
the dark peoples. Add to this that the trade, im- 
mensely lucrative as it seemed, was an enormous drain 
on the population of the little state ; and the causes of 
Portugal's decline, almost as sudden as its rise, are in 
large part explained. So rapid was it, indeed, that 
it was noticed not only by foreign travellers but by the 
natives. Camoens, though he dedicated his life to 
composing an epic in honor of Vasco da Gama, la- 
mented his country's decay in these terms: 



EXPLORATION 



445 



pride of empire! vain covetise 

Of that vain glory that we men call fame . . . 

What punishment and what just penalties 

Thou dost inflict on those thou dost inflame . . . 

Thou dost depopulate our ancient state 
Till dissipation brings debility. 

Nor were artificial causes wanting to make the col- 
onies expensive and the home treasury insolvent. The 
,£?ovemors as royal favorites regarded their appoint- 
ments as easy roads to quick wealth, and they plun- 
dered not only the inhabitants but their royal master. 
The inefficient and extravagant management of trade, 
which was a government monopoly, furnished a lam- 
entable example of the effects of public ownership. 
And when possible the church interfered to add the 
burden of bigotry to that of corruption. An amusing 
example of this occurred when a supposed tooth of 
Buddha was brought to Goa, to redeem which the Rajah 
of Pegu offered a sum equal to half a million dollars. 
While the government was inclined to sell, the arch- 
bishop forbade the acceptance of such tainted money 
and ordered the relic destroyed. 

Within Portugal itself other factors aided the de- i52i-80 
cline. From the accession of John III to the amalga- 
mation with Spain sixty years later, the Cortes was •"' 
rarely summoned. The expulsion of many Jews in 
1497, the massacre and subsequent exile of the New i506-7 
Christians or Marranos, most of whom went to Holland, The Inqui- 
commenced an era of destructive bigotry completed by taJjfigtj^ej 
the Inquisition. Strict censorship of the press and 1536 
the education of the people by the Jesuits each added, 
their bit to the forces of spiritual decadence. 

For the fury of religious zeal ill supplied the ex- 
hausted powers of a state fainting with loss of blood 
and from the intoxication of corruption. Gradually 
her grasp relaxed on North Africa until only three 



I 



1 



446 



THE IBERIAN PENINSULA 



1580-1640 



Other na- 
tions 
explore 



1577-80 



Russia 



small posts in Morocco were left her, those of Ceuta, 
Arzila and Tangier. A last frantic effort to recover 
them and to punish the infidel, undertaken by the young 
King Sebastian, ended in disaster and in his death in 
1578. After a short reign of two years by his uncle 
Henry, who as a cardinal had no legitimate heirs, Por- 
tugal feebly yielded to her strongest suitor, Philip II, 
and for sixty years remained a captive of Spain. 

Other nations eagerly crowded in to seize the trident 
that was falling from the hands of the Iberian peoples. 
There were James Cartier of France, and Sebastian 
Cabot and Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Francis Drake 
of England, and others. They explored the coast of 
North America and sought a Northwest Passage to 
Asia. Drake, after a voyage of two years and a half, 
duplicated the feat of Magellan, though he took quite 
a different course, following the American western 
coast up to the Golden Gate. He, too, returned ''very 
richly fraught with gold, silver, silk and precious 
stones," the best incentive to further endeavor. But 
no colonies of permanence and consequence were as 
yet planted by the northern nations. Until the seven- 
teenth century their voyages were either actuated by 
commercial motives or were purely adventurous. The 
age did not lack daring explorers by land as well as 
by sea. Lewis di Varthema rivalled his countryman 
Marco Polo by an extensive journey in the first decade 
of the century. Like Burckhardt and Burton in the 
nineteenth century he visited Mecca and Medina as 
a Mohammedan pilgrim, and also journeyed to Cairo, 
Beirut, Aleppo and Damascus and then to the distant 
lands of India and the Malay peninsula. 

It may seem strange to speak of Eussia in connec- 
tion with the age of discovery, and yet it was precisely 
in the light of a new and strange land that our Eng- 
lish ancestors regarded it. Cabot's voyage to the 



EXPLORATION 447 

White Sea in the middle of the century was every whit 
as new an adventure as was the voyage to India. 
Eichard Chancellor and others followed him and estab- 
lished a regular trade with Muscovy, and through it 1553 
and the Caspian with Asia. The rest of Europe, west 
of Poland and the Turks, hardly heard of Russia or 
felt its impact more than they now do of the Tartars 
of the Steppes. 

But it was just at this time that Russia was taking 
the first strides on the road to become a great power. 
How broadly operative were some of the influences at 
work in Europe lies patent in the singular parallel that 
her development offers to that of her more civilized 
contemporaries. Just as despotism, consolidation, and 
conquest were the order of the day elsewhere, so they Basil III, 
were in the eastern plains of Europe. Basil III struck i^os-^s 
down the rights of cities, nobles and princes to bring 
the whole country under his own autocracy. Ivan the 
Terrible, called Czar of all the Russias, added to this Ivaniv, 
policy one of extensive territorial aggrandizement. 
Having humbled the Tartars he acquired much land 
to the south and east, and then turned his attention to 
the west, where, however, Poland barred his way to 
the Baltic. Just as in its subsequent history, so then, 
one of the great needs of Russia was for a good port. 
Another of her needs was for better technical processes. 
Anticipating Peter the Great, Ivan endeavored to get 
German workmen to initiate good methods, but he 
failed to accomplish much, partly because Charles V 
forbade his subjects to go to add strength to a rival 
state. 

While Europe found most of the other continents Europe 
as soft as butter to her trenchant blade, she met her ^s.Asia 
match in Asia. The theory of Herodotus that the 
course of history is marked by alternate movements 
east and west has been strikingly confirmed by subse- 



448 THE TURKS 

qucnt events. In a secular grapple the two continents 
have heaved back and forth, neither being able to con- 
quer the other completely. If the empires of Macedon 
and Rome carried the line of victory far to the orient, 
they were avenged by the successive inroads of the 
Huns, the Saracens, the Mongols and the Turks. If 
for the last four centuries the line has again been 
pushed steadily back, until Europe dominates Asia, it 
is far from certain that this condition will be per- 
manent. 

In spiritual matters Europe owes a balance of in- 
debtedness to Asia, and by far the greater part of it 
to the Semites. The Phoenician alphabet and Arabian 
numerals are capital borrowed and yielding how enor- 
mous a usufruct ! Above all, Asiatic religions — albeit 
the greatest of them was the child of Hellas as well as 
of Judaea — have conquered the whole world save a 
few savage tribes. Ever since the cry of ''There is no 
God but Allah and Mahomet is his prophet" had 
aroused the Arabian nomads from their age-long slum- 
ber, it was as a religious warfare that the contest of 
the continents revealed itself. After the scimitar had 
swept the Greek Empire out of Asia Minor and had cut 
Spain from Christendom, the crusades and the rise of 
the Spanish kingdoms had gradually beaten it back. 
But while the Saracen was being slowly but surely 
driven from the western peninsula, the banner of the 
The Turks Cresccut in the east was seized by a race with a genius 
for war inversely proportional to its other gifts. The 
Turks, who have never added to the arts of peace any- 
thing more important than the fabrication of luxurious 
carpets and the invention of a sensuous bath, were able 
to found cannon and to drill battalions that drove the 
armies of nobler races before them. From the sack 
of Constantinople in 1453 to the siege of Vienna in 
1529 and even to some extent long after that, the ma- 



THE TURKS 449 

jestic and terrible advance of the janizaries threatened 
the whole fabric of Europe. 

Under Sultan Selim I the Turkish arms were turned Selimi, 

1512-20 

to the east and south. Persia, Kurdistan, Syria and 
Eg}'pt were crushed, while the title of Caliph, and with 
it the spiritual leadership of the Mahommetan world, 
was wrested from the last of the Abassid dynasty. 
But it was under his successor, Suleiman the Magnifi- Suleiman, 

1520-6 

cent, that the banner of the prophet, * 'fanned by con- 
quest's crimson wing," was borne to the heart of Eu- 
rope. Belgrade and Rhodes were captured, Hungary 
completely overrun, and Vienna besieged. The naval 
exploits of Khair-ed-din, called Barbarossa, carried 
the terror of the Turkish arms into the whole Med- 
iterranean, subdued Algiers and defeated the Chris- 
tian fleets under Andrew Doria. 

On the death of Suleiman the Crescent Moon had 
attained the zenith of its glory. The vast empire was 
not badly administered ; some authorities hold that jus- 
tice was better ser^^cd under the Sultan than under 
any contemporarj'^ Christian king. A hierarchy of offi- 
cials, administrative, ecclesiastical, secretarial and 
militarj^, held office directly under the Sultan, being 
wisely granted b}' him sufficient liberty to allow initia- 
tive, and- yet kept under control direct enough to pre- 
vent the secession of distant provinces. 

The international position of the infidel power was 
an anomalous one. Almost every pope tried to revive ,^ 
the crusading spirit against the arch-enemy of Christ, 
and the greatest epic poet of the sixteenth century 
chose for his subject the Delivery of Jerusalem in a 
holy war. On the other hand the Most Christian King 
found no difficulty in making alliances with the Sub- 
lime Porte, and the same course was advocated, though 
not adopted, by some of the Protestant states of Ger- 
many. Finally, that champion of the church, Philip 



.450 THE TURKS 

1580 IT, for the first time in the history of his country, made 

a peace with the infidel Sultan recognizing his right to 
exist in the society of nations. 

The sixteenth century, which in so much else marked 
a transition from medieval to modern times, in this 
also saw the turning-point of events, inasmuch as the 
tide drawn by the Half Moon to its flood about 1529, 
from that time onwards has steadily, if very slowly, 
ebbed. 



CHAPTER X 

SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

§ 1. Population 
Political history is that of the state; economic and ^"!|7°'5 

•' civilized 

intellectual history that of a different group. In mod- world 
em times this group includes all civilized nations. 
Even in political history there are many striking 
parallels, but in social development and in culture the 
recent evolution of civilized peoples has been nearly 
identical. This fundamental unity of the nations has 
grown stronger with the centuries on account of im- 
proving methods of transport and communication. 
Formally it might seem that in the Middle Ages the 
white nations were more closely bound together than 
they are now. They had one church, a nearly identi- 
cal jurisprudence, one great literature and one lan- 
guage for the educated classes; they even inherited 
from Rome the ideal of a single world-state. But if 
the growth of national pride, the division of the church 
and the rise of modern languages and literatures have 
been centrifugal forces, they have been outweighed by 
the advent of new" influences tending to bind all peoples 
together. The place of a single church is taken by a 
common point of view, the scientific; the place of Latin 
as a medium of learning has been taken by English, 
French, and German, each one more widely known to 
those to whom it is not native now than ever was Latin 
in the earlier centuries. The fruits of discovery are 
common to all nations, who now live under similar 
conditions, reading the same books and (under differ- 
ent names) the same newspapers, doing the same busi- 

451 



\ 

452 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

ness and enjoying the same luxuries in the same man- 
ner. Even in matters of government we are visibly 
approaching the perhaps distant but apparently cer- 
tain goal of a single world-state. 
Changes in jj^ estimating the economic and cultural conditions 
of the sixteenth century it is therefore desirable to 
treat Western Europe as a whole. One of the marked 
differences between all countries then and now is in 
population. No simple law has been discovered as to 
the causes of the fluctuations in the numbers of the peo- 
ple within a given territory. This varies with the 
wealth of the territory, but not in direct ratio to it; 
for it can be shown that the wealth of Europe in the 
last four hundred years has increased vastly more than 
its population. Nor can it be discovered to vary di- 
rectly in proportion to the combined amount and dis- 
tribution of wealth, for in sixteenth-century England 
while the number of the people w^as increasing wealth 
was being concentrated in fewer hands almost as fast 
as it was being created. It is obvious that sanitation 
and transportation have a good deal to do with the 
population of certain areas. The largest cities of our 
, own times could not have existed in the Middle Ages, 
for they could not have been provisioned, nor have 
been kept endurably healthy without elaborate aque- 
ducts and drains. 

Other more obscure factors enter in to complicate 
the problems of population. Some nations, like Spain 
in the sixteenth and Ireland in the nineteenth century, 
have lost immensely through emigration. The cause 
of this was doubtless not that the nation in question 
was growing absolutely poorer, but that the increase 
of wealth or in accessibility to richer lands made it 
relatively poorer. It is obvious again that great visi- 
tations like pestilence or war diminish population di- 
rectly, though the effect of such factors is usually tem- 



POPULATION 453 

porary. How much voluntary sterility operates is 
problematical. Aegidius Albertinus, writing in 1602, 
attributed the growth in population of Protestant 
countries since the Reformation to the abolition of 
sacerdotal celibacy, and this has also been mentioned 
as a cause by a recent writer. Probably the last named 
forces have a very slight influence; the primary one 
being, as Malthus stated, the increase of means of 
subsistence. 

As censuses were almost unknown to sixteenth-cen- 
tury Europe outside of a few Italian cities, the student 
is forced to rely for his data on various other calcula- 
tions, in some cases tolerably reliable, in others de- 
plorably deficient. The best of these are the enumera- 
tions of hearths made for purposes of taxation in sev- 
eral countries. Other counts were sometimes made for 
fiscal or militarj'^, and occasionally for religious, pur- 
poses. Estimates by contemporary observers supple- 
ment our knowledge, which may be taken as at least 
approximately correct. 

The religious census of 1603 gave the number of ^"f!^M 
communicants in England and Wales as 2,275,000, to 
which must be added 8475 recusants. Adding 50 per 
cent, for non-communicants, we arrive at the figure 
of 3,425,000, which is doubtless too low. Another cal- 
culation based on a record of births and deaths yields 
the figure 4,812,000 for the year 1600. The average, 
4,100,000, is probably nearly correct, of which about 
a tenth in Wales. England had grown considerably 
during the century, this increase being especially re- 
markable in the large towns. Whereas, in 1534, 150,- 
000 quarters of wheat were consumed in London an- 
nually, the figure for 1605 is 500,000. The population 
in the same time had probably increased from 60,000 
to 225,000. No figures worth anything can be given 
for Ireland, and for Scotland it is only safe to say 



and Wales 



454 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



The Neth- 
erlands 



Germany 



that in 1500 the population was about 500,000 and in 
1600 about 700,000. 

Enumerations of hearths and of communicants give 
good bases for reckoning the population of the Nether- 
lands. Holland, the largest of the Northern provinces, 
had about 200,000 people in 1514; Brabant the great- 
est of the Southern, in 1526 had 500,000. The popula- 
tion of the largest to"\vn, Antwerp, in 1526 was 88,000, 
in 1550 about 110,000. At the same time it is remark- 
able that in 1521 Ghent impressed Diirer as the great- 
est city he had seen in the Low Countries. For the 
whole territory of the Netherlands, including Holland 
and Belgium, and a little more on the borders, the 
population was in 1560 about 3,000,000. This is the 
same figure as that given for 1567 by Lewis Guic- 
ciardini. Later in the century the country suffered 
by war and emigration. 

The lack of a unified government, and the great di- 
versity of conditions, makes the population of Ger- 
many more difficult to estimate. Brandenburg, having 
in 1535 an area of 10,000 square miles, and a popula- 
tion between 300,000 and 400,000, has been aptly com- 
pared for size and numbers to the present state of Ver- 
mont. Bavaria had in 1554 a population of 434,000; 
in 1596 of 468,000. Wiirzburg had in 1538 only 12,000 ; 
Hamburg in 1521 12,000 and in 1594 19,000. Danzig 
had in 1550 about 21,000. The largest city in central 
Germany, if not in the whole country — as a chronicler 
stated in 1572 — was Erfurt, with a population of 32,- 
000 in 1505. It was the center of the rising Saxon 
industries, mining and dying, and of commerce. Lii- 
beck, Cologne, Nuremberg and Augsburg equalled or 
perhaps surpassed it in size, and certainly in wealth. 
The total population of German Switzerland was over 
200,000. The whole German-speaking population of 
Central Europe amounted to perhaps twenty millions 



POPULATION 455 

in 1600, though it had been reckoned by the imperial 
government in 1500 as twelve millions. 

The number of Frenchmen did not greatly increase France 
in France in the 16th century. Though the borders 
of the state were extended, she suffered terribly by 
religious wars, and somewhat by emigration. Not 
only did many Huguenots flee from her to Switzerland, 
the Netherlands and England, but economic reasons 
led to large movements from the south and perhaps 
from the north. To fill up the gap caused by emigra- 
tion from Spain a considerable number of French peas- 
ants moved to that land; and it is also possible that 
the same class of people sought new homes in Bur- 
gundy and Savoy to escape the pressure of taxes and 
dues. Various estimates concur in giving France a 
population of 15,000,000 to 16,000,000. The Paris of 
Henry II was by far the largest city in the world, 
numbering perhaps 300,000; but when Henry IV be- 
sieged it it had been reduced by war to 220,000. After 
that it waxed mightily again. 

Italy, leader in many ways, was the first to take ^^^^y 
accurate statistics of population, births and deaths. 
These begin by the middle of the fifteenth century, but 
are rare until the middle of the sixteenth, Avhen they 
become frequent. Notwithstanding war and pestilence 
the numbers of inhabitants seemed to grow steadil.y, 
the apparent result in the statistics being perhaps in 
part due to the increasing rigor of the census. Here- 
with follow specimens of the extant figures : The city 
of Brescia had 65,000 in 1505, and 43,000 in 1548. Dur- 
ing the same period, however, the people in her whole 
territory of 2200 square miles had increased from 303,- 
000 to 342,000. The city of Verona had 27,000 in 1473 
and 52,000 in 1548; her land of 1200 square miles had 
in the first named year 99,000, in the last 159,000. The 
kingdom of Sicily grew from 600,000 in 1501 to 800,- 



456 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

000 in 1548, and 1,180,000 in 1G15. The kingdom of 
Naples, without the capital, had about 1,270,000 people 
in 1501; 2,110,000 in 1545; the total including the cap- 
ital amounted in 1600 to 3,000,000. The republic of 
Venice increased from 1,650,000 in 1550 to 1,850,000 
in 1620. Florence with her territory had 586,000 in 
1551 and 649,000 in 1622. In the year 1600 Milan with 
Lombardy had 1,350,000 inhabitants; Savoy in Italy 
800,000; continental Genoa 500,000; Parma, Piacenza 
and Modena together 500,000; Sardinia 300,000; Cor- 
sica 150,000; Malta 41,000; Lucca 110,000. The popu- 
lation of Rome fluctuated violently. In 1521 it is sup- 
posed to have been about 55,000, but was reduced by 
the sack to 32,000. After this it rapidly recovered, 
reaching 45,000 under Paul IV (1558), and 100,000 un- 
der Sixtus V (1590). The total population of the 
States of the Church when the first census was taken 
in 1656 w^as 1,880,000. 
Spain The final impression one gets after reading the ex- 

tremely divergent estimates of the population of Spain 
is that it increased during the first half of the century 
and decreased during the latter half. The highest 
figure for the increase of population during the reign 
of Charles V is the untrustworthy one of Hiibler, who 
believes the number of inhabitants to have doubled. 
This belief is founded on the conviction that the wealth 
of the kingdom doubled in that time. But though popu- 
lation tends to increase with wealth, it certainly does 
not increase in the same proportion as wealth, so that, 
considering this fact and also that the increase in 
wealth as shown by the doubling of income from royal 
domains w^as in part merely apparent, due to the fall- 
ing value of money, we may dismiss Habler's figure 
as too high. And yet there is good evidence for the 
belief that there was a considerable increment. The 
cities especially gained with the new stimulus to com- 



POPULATION 457 

merce and industry. In 1525 Toledo employed 10,000 
workers in silk, who had increased fivefold by 1550. 
Unfortunately for accuracy these figures are merely 
contemporary guesses, but they certainly indicate a 
large growth in the population of Toledo, and similar 
figures are given for Seville, Burgos and other manu- 
facturing and trading centers. From such estimates, 
however, combined with the censuses of hearths, pecu- 
liarly unsatisfactory in Spain as they excluded the 
privileged classes and were, as their violent fluctua- 
tions show, carelessly made, we may arrive at the con- 
clusion that in 1557 the population of Spain was barely 
9,000,000. 

More difiicult, if possible, is it to measure the amount 
of the decline in the latter half of the century. It was Decline 
widely noticed and commented on by contemporaries, 
who attributed it in part to the increase in sheep- 
farming (as in England) and in part to emigration to 
America. There were doubtless other more impor- 
tant and more obscure causes, namely the increasing 
rivalry in both commerce and industry of the north 
of Europe and the consequent decay of Spain's means 
of livelihood. The emigration amounted on the aver- 
age to perhaps 4000 per annum throughout the cen- 
tury. The total Spanish population of America was 
reckoned by Velasco in 1574 at 30,500 households, or 
152,500 souls. This would, however, imply a much 
larger emigration, probably double the last number, 
to account for the many Spaniards lost by the perils 
of the sea or in the depths of the wilderness. It is 
known, for example, that whereas the Spanish popu- 
lation of Venezuela was reckoned at 200 households 
at least 2000 Spaniards had gone to settle there. An 
emigration of 300,000 before 1574, or say 400,000 for 
the whole century, would have left a considerable gap 
at home. Add to this the industrial decline by which 



Portugal 



General 
table 



458 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

Altamira reckons that the cities of the center and 
north, which suffered most, lost from one-half to one- 
third of their total population, and it is evident that a 
very considerable shrinkage took place. The census of 
1594 reported a population of 8,200,000. 

The same tendency to depopulation was noticed to a 
much greater degree by contemporary^ observers of 
Portugal. Unfortunately, no even approximately ac- 
curate figures can be given. Two million is almost 
certainly too large for 1600. 

The following statistical table will enable the reader 
to form some estimate of the movements of population. 
Admitting that the margin of error is fairly large in 
some of the earlier estimates, it is believed that they 
are sufficiently near the truth to be of real service. 

Country 1500 1600 

England and Wales 3,000,000 4,100,000 

Scotland 500,000 700,000 

The Netherlands (Holland and Bel- 
gium) (1550) 3,000,000 

Germany (including Austria, German 
Switzerland, Franche Comte and 
Savoy north of the Alps, but ex- 
cluding Hungary, the Netherlands, 

East and West Prussia) 12,000,000 20,000,000 

France (1550) 16,000,000 

Italy 10,000,000 13,000,000 

Spain (1557 and 1594) 9,000,000 ^ 8,200,000 

Poland with East and West Prussia. . 3,000,000 

Denmark 600,000 

Sweden, Norway and Finland 1,400,000 



Gigantic 
increase in 
wealth 
since 16th 
century 



§ 2. Wealth and Prices 

If the number of Europe's inhabitants has increased 
fourfold since Luther 's time, the amount of her wealth 
has increased in a vastly greater ratio. The difference 

1 For a higher estimate — ten to twelve millions in 1500 — see note in 
bibliography. 



WEALTH AND PRICES 459 

between the twentieth and the sixteenth centuries is 
greater than anyone would at first Wush believe pos- 
sible. Moreover it is a difference that is, during times 
of peace, continually increasing. During the century 
from the close of the Napoleonic to the opening of the 
Great War, the wealth of the white races probably 
doubled every twenty-five years. The new factors that 
made this possible were the exploited resources of 
America, and the steam-engine. Prior to 1815 the in- 
crease of the world's wealth was much slower, but if 
it doubled once a century, — as would seem not im- 
probable — we should have to allow that the world of 
1914 was one hundred and twenty-eight times as rich 
as it was in 1514. 

Of course such a statement cannot pretend to any- 
thing like exactitude ; the mathematical figure is a mere Change 
figure of speech; it is intended only to emphasize the ^^^^^ ^^ 
fact that one of the most momentous changes during affluence 
the last four centuries has been that from poverty to emphasized 
affluence. That the statement, surprising as it may 
seem, is no exaggeration, may be borne out by a few 
comparisons. 

One of the tests of a nation's financial strength is ^^ra 

tPSt of 3. 

that of war. Francis I in time of war mustered at natjo^'g 
most an army of 100,000, and he reached this figure, financial 
or perhaps slightly exceeded it, only once during his ^^^^^si 
reign, in the years 1536-7. This is only half the num- 
ber of soldiers, proportionately to the population, that 
France maintained in time of peace at the opening of 
the twentieth century. And for more than four years, 
at a time when war was infinitely more expensive than 
it was when Pavia was fought, France kept in the field 
about an even five millions of men, more than an eighth 
of her population instead of about one one-hundred- 
and-fiftieth. Similar figures could be given for Ger- 
many and England. It is true that the power of mod- 



460 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



Labor 
power of 
the world 



Poverty of 
the Middle 



ern states is multiplied by their greater facilities for 
borrowing, but with all allowances the contrast sug- 
gests an enormous difference of wealth. 

Take, as a standard of comparison, the labor power 
of the world. In 1918 the United States alone pro- 
duced 685,000,000 tons of coal. Each ton burned gives 
almost as much power as is expended by two laborers 
working for a whole year. Thus the United States 
from its coal only had command of the equivalent 
of the labor of 1,370,000,000 men, or more than thrice 
the adult male labor power of the whole world; 
more than fifty times the whole labor power of six- 
teenth-century Europe. This does not take account 
of the fact that labor is far more productive now than 
then, even without steam. The comparison is instruc- 
tive because the population of the United States in 
1910 was about equal to that of the whole of Europe 
in 1600. 

The same impression would be given by a compari- 
son of the production of any other standard product. 
More gold was produced in the year 1915 than the 
whole stock of gold in the world in 1550, perhaps in 
1600. More wheat is produced annually in Minnesota 
than the granaries of the cities of the world would 
hold four centuries ago. 

In fact, there was hardly wealth at all in the Middle 
Ages, only degrees of poverty, and the sixteenth cen- 
tury first began to see the accumulation of fortunes 
worthy of the name. In 1909 there were 1100 persons 
in France with an income of more than $40,000 per 
annum ; among them were 150 with an income of more 
than $200,000. In England in 1916 seventy-nine per- 
sons paid income taxes on estates of more than $125,- 
000,000. On the other hand the richest man in France, 
Jacques Coeur, whose fortune was proverbial like that 
of Rockefeller today, had in 1503 a capital of only 



WEALTH AND PRICES 461 

$5,400,000. The total wealtli of the house of Fugger 
about 1550 has been estimated at $32,000,000, though 
the capital of their bank was never anything like that. 
The contrast was greatest among the very richest 
class, but it was sufficiently striking in the middle 
classes. Such a condition as comfort hardly existed. 

The same impression will bo given to the student 
of public finance. As more will be said in another 
paragraph on the revenues of the principal states, only 
one example need be given here for the sake of con- 
trast. The total revenue of Francis I was $256,000 
per annum, that of Henry II even less, $228,000. The 
revenue of France in 1905 was $750,000,000. Henry 
VIII often had more difficulty in raising a loan of 
£50,000 than the English government had recently in 
borrowing six billions. 

It is impossible to say which is the harder task, to Value of 
compare the total wealth of the world at two given ""^"^^ 
periods, or to compare the value of money at different 
times. Even the mechanical difficulties in the compari- 
son of prices are enormous. When we read that wheat 
at Wittenberg sold at one gulden the scheffel, it is 
necessary to determine in the first place how much a 
gulden and how much a scheffel represented in terms 
of dollars and bushels. When we discover that there 
were half a dozen different gTildens, and half a dozen 
separate measures known as scheffels, varying from 
province to province and from time to time, and vary- 
ing widely, it is evident that great caution is necessary 
in ascertaining exactly which gulden and exactly which 
scheffel is meant. 

When coin and measure have been reduced to known 
quantities, there remains the problem of fixing the 
quality. Cloth is quoted in the sixteenth century as of 
standard sizes and grades, but neither of these im- 
portant factors is accurately known to any modern 



462 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

economist. One would think that in quoting prices of 
animals an invariable standard would be secured. 
Quite the contrary. So much has the breed of cattle 
improved that a fat ox now weighs two or three times 
what a good ox weighed four centuries ago. Horses 
are larger, stronger and faster; hens lay many more 
eggs, cows give much more milk now than formerly. 
Shoes, clothes, lumber, candles, are not of the same 
quality in different centuries, and of course there is 
an ever increasing list of new articles in which no 
comparison can be made. 
Fluctuation Nevertheless, some allowance can be made for all 
in coinage factors iuvolved, as far as they are mechanical; some 
comparisons can be given that bear a sufficiently close 
relation to exactitude to form the basis from which cer- 
tain valid deductions can be drawn. Now first as to 
the intrinsic value, in amounts of gold and silver in 
the several coins. The vast fluctuation in the value of 
the English shilling, due to the successive debasements 
and final restitution of the coinage, is thus expressed : 



Year 


Troy graiTis 


Year 


Troy grains 


1461 


133 


1551.... 


20 


1527 


118 


1552.... 


88 


1543 


100 


1560.... 


89 


1545 


60 


1601.... 


86 


1546 


40 


1919.... 


87.27 



A similar depreciation, more gradual but never rec- 
tified, is seen in the value of French money. The 
standard of reckoning was the livre tournois, which 
varied intrinsically in value of the silver put into it as 
follows : 

Years Intrinsic value of silver 

1500 93 cents 

1512-40 78 cents 

1541-60 66 cents 

1561-72 62 cents 



WEALTH AND PKICES 463 

Years Intrinsic value of silver 

1573-79 57 cents 

1580-1600 51 cents 

The standard Spanish gold coin after 1497 was the Value of 
ducat, which had 3.485 srrammos of erold (value in our ^.^"'^ 

' o o \ coins 

money $2.40). This was divided into 375 maravedis, 
which therefore had a value of about two-thirds of a 
cent each. A Castilian marc of gold had 230 grammes 
or a value of about $16. After 1537 a handsome silver 
coin, known as the peso fuerte or ''piece of eight" be- 
cause each contained eight reals, was minted in Amer- 
ica. Its value was about $1.06 of our money, it being 
the predecessor of our dollar. 

The great difficulty with the coinage of Germany 
and Italy is not so much in its fluctuation as in the 
number of mints. The name gulden was given to al- Gulden a 
most any coin, originally, as its etj-mology signifies, ^l^^^ 
a gold piece, but later also to a silver piece. Among 
gold guldens there was the Rhenish gulden intrinsically 
worth $1.34; the Philip's gulden in the Netherlands 
of 96^ and the Carolus gulden coined after 1520 and 
worth $1.14. But the coin commonly used in reckon- 
ing was the silver gulden, worth intrinsically 56^. 
This was divided into 20 groschen. Other coins quite 
ordinarily met with in the literature of the times are 
pounds (7.5^), pfennigs (various values), stivers, 
crowns, nobles, angels ($2), and Hungarians ducats 
($1.75). Since 1518 the chief silver coin was the thaler, 
at first considered the equal of a silver guidon. The 
law of 1559, however, made them two different coins, 
restoring the thaler to what had probably been its 
former value of 72^, and leaving the imperial gulden 
in law, what it had commonly become in fact, a lesser 
amount of silver. 

The coinage of Italy was dominated by the gold 
gulden or florin of Florence and the ducat of Venice, 



464 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

each worth not far from $2.25 of our money. Both 
these coins, partly on account of their beauty, partly 
because of the simjole honesty with which they were 
kept at the nominal standard, attained just fame 
throughout the Middle Ages and thereafter, and be- 
came widely used in other lands. 
Wheat The standard of value determined, it is now possible 

to compare the prices of some staple articles. First 
in importance comes wheat, which fluctuated enor- 
mously within short periods at the same place and in 
terms of the same amounts of silver. From Luther's 
letters we learn that wheat sold at Wittenberg for one 
gulden a schetfel in 1539 and for three groschen a 
scheffel in 1542, the latter price being considered *^so 
cheap as never before," the former reached in a time 
almost of famine and calling for intervention on the 
part of the government. However we interpret these 
figures (and I believe them to mean that wheat sold 
at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they 
certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, 
due to the poor communications and backward methods 
of agriculture, making years of plenty alternate with 
years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the lower 
level was nearer the normal, for in 1527 wheat was 
there sold at twenty cents a bushel. In other parts of 
Germany it was dearer; at Strassburg from 1526-50 
it averaged 30 cents a bushel ; from 1551-75 it went up 
to an average of 58 cents, and from 1576-1600 the 
average again rose to 80 cents a bushel. 

Prices also rose in England throughout the century 
even in terms of silver. Of course part of the rise in 
the middle years was due to the debasement of the 
coinage. Eeduced to bushels and dollars, the follow- 
ing table shows the tendency of prices : 

1530 17 cents a bushel 

1537 30 cents 



WEALTH AND PRICES 465 

1544 45 cents 

1546 69 cents 

1547 12 cents 

1548 24 cents 

1549 48 cents 

1550 54 cents 

1572 GQ cents 

1595 $1.14 

Wheat in France averaged 23 cents a bushel prior to 
1540, after which it rose markedly in price, touching 
$1.50 in 1600, under exceptional conditions. In order 
to compare with prices nowadays we must remember 
that $1 a bushel was a remarkably good price before 
the late war, during which it was fixed at $2.20 by the 
American government. Barley in England rose from 
6 cents a bushel in 1530 to 10 cents in 1547 and 33 
cents in 1549. It was in 1913 70 cents a bushel. Oats 
rose from 5 cents a bushel in England in 1530 to 18 
cents in 1549 ; in 1913 38 cents. 

Animals sold much lower in the sixteenth century Animals 
than they do now, though it must be remembered that 
they are worth more after several centuries of careful 
breeding. Horses then sold at $2.50 in England and 
at $4 to $11 in France; the average price in 1913 was 
$244 for working animals. Cows were worth $2 in 
England in 1530; from $4 to $6.40 in France; oxen 
apparently came considerably higher, averaging in 
England $10 a head in 1547 and in France from $9 to 
$16 a yoke. At present they are sold by weight, aver- 
aging in 1913 9^ per lb., or $90 for one weighing a 
thousand pounds. Beef then cost about 2/3 of a cent 
a pound instead of 40^ as in 1914. A sheep was sold 
in 1585 at $1.60, a large swine at $5, and pigs at 26^ 
apiece. Pork cost 2^ a pound; hens sold in England 
at 12^ a piece and geose and ducks for the same; at 
Wittenberg geose fetched only 6^ in 1527. Eggs might 
have been bought at 2^ a dozen. 



460 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



Groceries Wholesale prices of groceries, taken mostly from an 
English table drawn up about 1580, were as follows: 
Oil was $140 the ton, or 55 cents a gallon; train-oil 
was just half that price; Newfoundland fish cost then 
$2.50 the quintal dry, as against $7.81 in 1913. Gascon 
wines (claret) varied according to quality, from 16 
cents to 24 cents a quart. Salt fetched $7.50 a ton, 
which is very close to the price that it was in 1913 
($1.02 per bbl. of 280 lbs.). Soap was $13 the hundred- 
weight. Pepper and sugar cost nearly the same, about 
$70 the hundredweight, or far higher than they were in 
1919, when each cost $11 the hundredweight. Spices 
also cost more in the sixteenth century than they do 
now, and rose throughout the century. By 1580 the 
wholesale price per hundredweight was $224 for cloves, 
the same for nutmegs, $150 for cinnamon, $300 for 
mace. Ginger was $90 the hundredweight, and candles 
6.C)(^ the lb. as against 7.25^ now. 

Drygoods Drygoods varied immensely in cost. Raw wool sold 
in England in 1510 for 4 cents per lb., as against 26 
cents just four hundred years later. Fine cloth sold 
at $65 ''the piece," the length and breadth of which 
it is unfortunately impossible to determine accurately. 
Different grades came in different sizes, averaging a 
yard in width, but from 18 yards to 47 yards in length, 
the finer coming in longer rolls. Sorting cloths were 
$45 the piece. Linen cost 20 cents a yard in 1580; 
iMary, Queen of Scots, five years later paid $6.50 the 
yard for purple velvet and 28 cents the yard for buck- 
ram to line the same. The coarse clothes of the poor 
were cheaper, a workman's suit in France costing 
$1.80 in 1600, a child's whole wardrobe $3.40, and a 
soldier's uniform $4.20. The prices of the poorest 
women's dresses ranged from $3 to $6 each. In 1520 
Albert Durer paid in the Netherlands 17 cents for one 
pair of shoes, 33 cents for another and 20 cents for a 



iWEALTH AND PRICES 467 

pair of woman ^s gloves. A pair of spectacles cost him 
22 cents, a pair of gloves for himself 38 cents. 

Metals were dearer in the sixteenth century than Metals 
they are now. Iron cost $60 a ton in 1580 against $22 
a ton in 1913. Lead fetched $-12 the ton and tin $15 
the cwt. The ratio of gold to silver was about 1 to 11. 
The only fuel much used was wood, which was fairly 
cheap but of course not nearly as efficient as our coal. 

Interest, as the price of money, varied then as it Interest 
does now in inverse ratio to the security offered by the 
debtor, and on the whole within much the same range 
that it does now. The best security was believed to 
be that of the German Free Cities, governed as they 
were by the commercial class that appreciated the vir- 
tue of prompt and honest payment. Accordingly, we 
find that they had no trouble in borrowing at 5 per 
cent., their bonds taking the form of perpetual annui- 
ties, like the English consols. So eagerly were these 
investments sought that they were apportioned on pe- 
tition as special favors to the creditors. The cities of 
Paris and London also enjoyed high credit. The na- 
tional governments had to pay far higher, owing to 
their poverty and dishonesty. Francis I borrowed at 
10 per cent. ; Charles V paid higher in the market of 
Antwerp, the extreme instance being that of 50 per 
cent, per annum. In 1550 he regularly paid 20 per 
cent., a ruinous rate that foreshadowed his bankruptcy 
and was partly caused by its forecast. Until the re- 
cent war we were accustomed to think of the great na- 
tions borrowing at 2-4 per cent., but during the war 
the rate immensely rose. Anglo-French bonds, backed 
by the joint and several credit of the two nations, sold 
on the New York Stock Exchange in 1918 at a price 
that would yield the investor more than 12 per cent., 
and City of Paris bonds at a rate of more than 16 per 
cent. 



468 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

Commercial paper, or loans advanced by banks to 
merchants on good security, of course varied. The 
lowest was reached at Genoa where from time to time 
merchants secured accommodation at 3 per cent. The 
average in Germany was 6 per cent, and this was made 
the legal rate by Brandenburg in 1565. But usurers, 
able to take advantage of the necessities of poor debt- 
ors, habitually exacted more, as they do now, and loans 
on small mortgages or on pawned articles often ran 
at 30 per cent. On the whole, the rate of interest fell 
slightly during the century. 

Real estate The price of real estate is more difficult to compare 
than almost anything, owing to the individual circum- 
stances of each purchase. Land in France sold at 
rates ranging from $8 to $240 the acre. Luther bought 
a little farm in the country for $340, and a piece of 
property in Wittenberg for $500. After his death, in 
1564, the house he lived in, a large and handsome 
building formerly the Augustinian Cloister, fetched 
$2072. The house can be seen today ^ and would cer- 
tainly, one would think, now bring fifteen times as 
much. 

Books Books were comparatively cheap. The Greek Testa- 

ment sold for 48 cents, a Latin Testament for half that 
amount, a Latin folio Bible published in 1532 for $4, 
Luther's first New Testament at 84 cents. One might 
get a cojDy of the Pandects for $1.60, of Vergil for 10 
cents, a Greek grammar for 8 cents, Demosthenes and 
Aeschines in one volume at 20 cents, one of Luther's 
more important tracts for 30 cents and the condemna- 
tion of him by the universities in a small pamphlet at 
6 cents. One of the things that has gone down most 
in price since that day is postage. Diirer while in the 
Netherlands paid a messenger 17 cents to deliver a 

1 See the photograph in my Life and Letters of Luther, p. 364. 



WEALTH AND PRICES 469 

letter (or several letters?), presumably sent to his 
home in Nuremberg. 

In accordance with the general rule that wages fol- Wages 
low the trend of prices sluggishly, whether upwards 
or downwards, there is less change to be observed in 
them throughout the sixteenth century than there is in 
the prices of commodities. Subject to government 
regulation, the remuneration of all kinds of labor re- 
mained nearly stationary while the cost of living was 
rising. Startling is the difference in the rewards of 
the various classes, that of the manual laborers being 
cruelly low, that of professional men somewhat less 
in proportion to the cost of li\ing than it is today, and 
that of government officers being very high. No one 
except court officials got a salary over $5000 a year, 
and some of them got much more. In 1553 a French 
chamberlain was paid $51,000 per annum. 

A French navvy received 8 cents a day in 1550, a 
carpenter as much as 26 cents. A male domestic was 
given $7 to $12 a year in addition to his keep and a 
woman $5 to $6. As the number of w^orking days in 
Catholic countries was only about 250 a year, workmen 
made from $65 to as low as $20. If anything, labor 
was worse paid in Germany than it was in France. 
Agricultural labor in England was paid in two scales, 
one for summer and one for winter. It varied from 
3 cents to 7 cents a day, the smaller sum being paid 
only to men who were also boarded. In summer free- 
masons and master carpenters got from 8 cents to 11 
cents for a terribly long day, in winter 6 cents to 9 
cents for a shorter day. The following scale was fixed 
by law in England in 1563: A hired farmer was to 
have $10 a year and $2 for livery; a common farm 
hand was allowed $8.25 and $1.25 extra for livery; a 
''mean servant" $6 and $1.25 respectively, a man child 



470 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



Pay of 
clergymen 



Physicians 



$4 and $1 ; a chief woman cook $5 and $1.60, a mean 
or simple woman $3 and $1 ; a woman child $2.50 and 
$1. All were of course boarded and lodged. 

The pay of French soldiers under Francis I was for 
privates $28 a year in time of war; this fell to $14 
a year in time of peace; for captains $33 a month in 
time of peace and $66 in time of war. Captains in the 
English navy received $36 a month; common seamen 
$1.25 a month for wages and the same allowance for 
food. 

The church fared little better than the army. In 
Scotland, a poor country but one in which the clergy 
were respected, by the law of 1562, a parson if a single 
man was given $26 a year, if a married man a maximum 
of $78 a year; probably a parsonage was added. 
Doubtless many Protestant ministers eked out their 
subsistence by fees, as the Catholic priests certainly 
did. Diirer gave 44 cents to a friar who confessed his 
wife. Every baptism, marriage and burial was taxed 
a certain amount. In France one could hire a priest 
to say a mass at from 60 cents to $7 in 1500, and at from 
30 to 40 cents in 1600. At this price it has remained 
since, a striking instance of religious conservatism 
working to the detriment of the priest, for the same 
money represents much less in real wages now than 
it did then. 

Fees for physicians ranged from 33 to 44 cents a 
visit in Germany about 1520. Treatment and medi- 
cine were far higher. At Antwerp Diirer paid $2.20 
for a small quantity of medicine for his wife. Fees 
were sometimes given for a whole course of attendance. 
In England we hear of such ' ' cures ' ' paid for at from 
$3.30 to $5. Very little, if any, advice was given free 
to the poor. The physicians for the French king re- 
ceived a salary of $200 a year and other favors. Wil- 
liam Butts, physician to Henry VIII, had $500 per 



WEALTH AND PRICES 471 

annum, in addition to a knighthood; and his salary 
was increased to over $600 for attending the Duke of 
Richmond. 

Teachers in the lower schools were regarded as lack- Teachers 
eys and paid accordingly. Nicholas Udal, head master 
of Eton, received $50 per annum and various small al- 
lowances. University professors were treated more 
liberally. Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg got 
a maximum of $224 per annum, which was about the 
same as the stipend of leading professors in other Ger- 
man universities and at Oxford and Cambridge. The 
teacher also got a small honorarium from each student. 
When Paul III restored the Sapienza at Rome he paid 
a minimum of $17 per annum to some friars who taught 
theology and who were cared for by their order, but he 
gave high salaries to the professors of rhetoric and 
medicine. Ordinarily these received $476 a year, but 
one professor of the classics reached the highwater- 
mark with nearly $800. 

The rewards of literary men were more consistently Royalties 
small in the sixteenth century than they are now, owing 
to the absence of effective copyright. An author 
usually received a small sum from the printer to whom 
he first offered his manuscript, but his subsequent roy- 
alties, if any, depended solely on the goodwill of the 
publisher. A Wittenberg printer offered Luther $224 
per annum for his manuscripts, but the Reformer de- 
clined it, wishing to make his books as cheap as pos- 
sible. In 1512 Erasmus got $8.40 from Badius the 
Parisian printer for a new edition of his Adages. In 
fact, the rewards of letters, such as they were, were in- 
direct, in the form of pensions, gifts and benefices from 
the great. Erasmus got so many of these favors that 
he lived more than comfortably. Luther died almost 
a rich man, so many honoraria did he collect from 
noble admirers. Rabelais was given a benefice, though 



472 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

he onlj^ lived two years afterwards to enjoy its fruits. 
Henry VIII gave $500 to Thomas Murner for writing 
against Luther. But the lot of the average writer was 
hard. Fulsome flattery was the most lucrative pro- 
duction of the muse. 
Artists Artists fared better. Diirer sold one picture for 

$375 and another for $200, not counting the "tip" 
which his wife asked and received on each occasion 
from the patron. Probably his woodcuts brought him 
more from the printers than any single painting, and 
when he died he left the then respectable sum of $32,- 
000. He had been offered a pension of $300 per annum 
and a house at Antwerp by that city if he would settle 
there, but he preferred to return to Nuremberg, where 
he was pensioned $600 a year by the emperor. Leon- 
ardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both received $129 
a month for work done for a prince, and the latter was 
given a pension of $5200 a year by Paul HI. Eaphael 
in 1520 left an estate of $140,000. 

If a comparison of the value of money is made, the 
final impression that one gets is that an ounce of gold 
was in 1563, let us say, expected to do about ten times 
as much work as the same weight of precious metal 
performed in 1913.^ If a few articles were then ac- 
tually dearer, they were comparatively unimportant 
and were balanced by other articles even more than ten 
times as cheap. But a dollar will buy so many articles 
now which did not exist in former ages that a plausible 
case can bo made out for the paradox that money is 
now worth more than it ever was before. If an ounce 
of gold would in Luther's time exchange for a much 
larger quantity of simple necessaries than it will pur- 
chase now, on the other hand a man with an income 
of $5000 a year is far better off than a man with the 

1 No valid comparison can be made for the years after 1913, for in^ 
most nations paper currencies have ousted gold. 



Value of 
money 



WEALTH AND PRICES 



473 



same income, or indeed with any income, was then. 

Notwithstanding the great difficulties of making out Trend of 
any fair index number representing tlie cost of living 
and applicable to long periods, owing to the fact that 
articles vary from time to time, as when candles are 
replaced by gas and gas by electricity, yet the general 
trend of prices can be pretty plainly ascertained. 
Generally speaking, prices — measured in weight of 
gold and not in coin — sank slowly from 1390 till 1520 
under the influence of better technical methods of pro- 
duction and possibly of the draining of gold and silver 
to the Orient. From 1520 till 1560 prices rose quite 
slowly on account of the increased production of gold 
and silver and its more rapid circulation by means of 
better banking. From 1560 to 1600 prices rose with 
enormous rapidity, partly because of the destruction 
of wealth and increase in the cost of production fol- 
lowing in the wake of the French and Dutch wars of 
religion, and still more, perhaps, on account of the 
torrent of American silver suddenly poured into the 
lap of Europe. Taking the century as a whole, we find 
that wheat rose the most, as much as 150 per cent, in 
England, 200 per cent, in France and 300 per cent, in 
Germany. Other articles rose less, and in some cases 
remained stationary, or sank in price. Money wages 
rose slowly, far less than the cost of living. 

Apart from special circumstances affecting the pro- 
duction of particular classes of goods, the main cause 
of the general trend of prices upwards was probably metals 
the increase in the volume of the precious metals. 
Just how great this was, it is impossible to determine, 
and yet a calculation can be made, yielding figures near 
enough the actual to be of service. From the middle 
of the fifteenth century there had been a considerable 
increase in the production of silver from German, 
Bohemian and Hungarian mines. Although this in- 



Increase in 
volume of 
precious 



•474 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

crease was much more than is usually allowed for — 
equalling, in the opinion of one scholar, the produce of 
American mines until nearly the middle of the sixteenth 
century — it was only enough to meet the expanding 
demands of commerce. Before America entered the 
market, there was also a considerable import of gold 
from Asia and Africa. The tide of Mexican treasure 
began to flood Spain about 1520, but did not reach the 
other countries in large quantities until about 1560, 
When we consider the general impression concerning 
the increase of the currency immediately following the 
pillage of the Aztecs and Incas, the following statistics 
of the English mint are instructive, if they are not 
enigmatical. During the first fourteen years of Henry 
VIII (1509-23) the average amount of gold minted 
in England was 24,G66 troy pounds per annum, and 
of silver 31,225 troy pounds. But in the years 1537- 
40, before the great debasement of the currency had 
taken place, the amount of gold coined fell to 3,297 
Troy pounds per annum, and that of silver rose only 
to 52,974 troy pounds. As each pound of gold was 
at that time worth as much as eleven pounds of silver, 
this means that the actual amount of new money put 
into circulation each year in the latter period was less 
than a third of that minted in the earlier years. The 
figures also indicate the growing cheapness of silver, 
stimulating its import, while the import of gold was 
greatly restricted, according to Gresham's law that 
cheap money drives out dear. 
Estimates of The spoil of Mcxico and Peru has frequently been 
^nler over-estimated, by none more extravagantly than by 

products the Conquistadores and their contemporaries. But 
the estimates of modern scholars varj^ enormously. 
Lexis believes that the total amount of gold produced 
by Europe and America from 1501 to 1550 (the greater 
part, of course, by America) amounted to $134,000,000, 



estimate 



WEALTH AND PRICES 475 

F. de Laiglesio, on the other hand, thinks that not 
more than $4,32(3,000 was mined in America before 
1555. The most careful estimate, that made by Pro- 
fessor Haring, arrives at the following results, the Haring's 
amounts being given in pesos each worth very nearly 
the same as our dollar. Mexican production : 

1521-11 1545-60 

Oold 5,348,000 343,670 

Silver 4,130,170 22,467,111 

For Peru the proportions of gold and silver cannot 
be separated, but the totals taken together from 1531- 
1560 amounted to probably 84,350,000 pesos. Other 
small sums came from other parts of the New World, 
and the final total for production of gold and silver in 
America until 1560 is given at 139,720,000 pesos. This 
is a reduction to 70 per cent, of the estimate of Lexis. 
Assuming that the same correction must be made on 
all of the estimates given by Lexis we have the follow- 
ing figures for the world's production of precious met- 
als in kilogrammes and in dollars : ^ 





Gold 


Silver 


Average per annum 


Average 


per annum 
in 








pesos or 








dollars 








of 25 


n kilos 


in dollars 


kilos 


grammes 


4270 


3,269,000 


31,570 


1,262,800 


4893 


3,425,000 


52,010 


2,080,400 


4718 


3,302,600 


184,730 


7,389,200 


4718 


3,302,600 


185,430 


7,417,200 


4641 


3,268,700 


230,480 


9,219,200 



1493-1520 ., 
1521-44 
1545-60 
1561-80 
1581-1600 . , 

1 These fi<riire3 are based on those of Sommerlad in the Handicorter- 
hurh der 8taatsit-issensrhaften, s.v. "Preis," taken from Wiobe, who 
based on Lexis. Figures quite similar to those of Sommerlad arc given 
by C. F. Bastable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Money." I 
have incorporated Haring's corrections. 



476 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

Combining these figures we see that the production of 
gold was pretty steady throughout the century, making 
a total output of about $330,000,000. The production 
of silver, however, greatly increased after 1544. From 
the beginning of the century to that year it amounted 
to $75,285,600 ; from 1545 to 1600 inclusive it increased 
to $450,955,200, making a total output for the century 
of $526,240,800. Of course these figures only roughly 
approximate the truth ; nevertheless they give a correct 
idea of the general processes at work. Even for the 
first half of the century the production of the precious 
metals was far in excess of anything that had preceded, 
and this output, large as it was, was nearly tripled in 
the last half of the century. These figures, however, 
are extremely modest compared with those of recent 
times, when more gold is mined in a year than was 
then mined in a century. The total amount mined in 
1915 was $470,000,000; in 1917 $428,000,000; for the 
period 1850 to 1916 inclusive the total amount mined 
was $13,678,000,000. 

§ 3. Institutions. 

Themon- For a variety of reasons the sixteenth century was 

archies ^g monarchical in mind as the twentieth century is 
democratic. Immemorial prescription then had a 
vigor since lost, and monarchy descended from classical 
and biblical antiquity when kings were hedged with a 
genuine divinity. The study of Roman law, with its 
absolutist maxims, aided in the formation of royalist 
sentiment. The court as the center of fashion at- 
tracted a brilliant society, while the small man satis- 
fied his cravings for gentility by devouring the court 
gossip that even then clogged the presses. It is prob- 
able that one reason why the throne became so popular 
was that it was, next to the church, the best advertised 



INSTITUTIONS 477 

article in the world. But underlying these sentimental 
reasons for loyalty there was a basis of solid utility, 
predisposing men to support the scepter as the one 
power strong enough to overawe the nobles. One 
tyrant was better than many; one lion could do less 
liarm than a pack of wolves and hyaenas. In the 
greater states men felt perfectly helpless without a 
king to rule the anarchical chaos into which society 
would have dissolved without him. When the Spanish 
Communes rebelled against Charles V they triumphed 
in the field, but their attempt simply collapsed in face 
of their utter inability to solve the problem of govern- 
ment without a royal governor. They were as help- 
less as bees without a queen. Indeed, so strong was 
their instinct to get a royal head that they tried to 
l)reserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's mother, ^ 
jioor, mad Joanna, to fill the political vacuum that 
they had made. So in the civil wars in France; not- 
withstanding the more promising materials for the 
formation of a republic in that country, all parties 
were, in fact, headed by claimants to the throne. 

Next to the king came the Council of State, composed Councils 

of State 

of princes of the blood, cardinals, nobles and some offi- 
cers and secretaries of state, not always of noble blood 
but frequently, especially in the cases of the most pow- 
erful of them, scions of the middle class. What pro- 
portion of the executive power was wielded by the 
Council depended on the personal character of the 
monarch. Henry VIII was always master; Elizabeth 
was more guided than guiding; the Councils of the 
Valois and Ilapsburgs profited by the preoccupation . 
or the stupidity of their masters to usurp the royal 
power for themselves. In public opinion the Council 
occupied a great place, similar to that of an English 
Cabinet today. The first Anglican prayerbook con- 



Parlia- 
ments 



478 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

tains petitions for the Council, though it did not occur 
to the people to pray for Parliament until the next cen- 
tury. 

The countries were governed no longer by the nobles 
as such but by officials appointed by the crown. It is 
an indication of the growing nationalization of policy 
that the sixteenth century saw the first establishment 
of permanent diplomatic agents. The first ambassa- 
dors, selected largely from a panel of bishops, magis- 
trates, judges and scholars, were expected to function 
not only as envoys but also as spies. Under them was 
a host of secret agents expected to do underhand work 
and to take the responsibility for it themselves so that, 
if found out, they could be repudiated. 

Very powerful was the national popular assembly: 
the Parliament, the Diet, the States General, or the 
Cortes. Its functions, prescriptive and undefined, 
were commonly understood to include the granting of 
taxes. The assent of the body was also required, to a 
varying degree, for the sanction of other laws. But 
the real power of the people's representatives lay in 
the fact that they were the chief organ for the expres- 
sion of that public opinion which in all countries and 
at all times it is unsafe for governments to disregard. 
Sitting in two or more chambers to represent the sev- 
eral estates or sometimes — as in the German Diet — 
subdivisions of these estates, the representatives were 
composed of members of the privileged orders, the 
clergy and nobility, and of the elected representatives 
of the city aristocracies. The majority of the popula- 
tion, the poor, were unrepresented. That this class 
had as great a stake in the commonwealth as any other, 
and that they had a class consciousness capable of de- 
manding reforms and of taking energetic measures to 
secure them, is shown by a number of rebellions of the 
proletariat, and yet it is not unfair to them, or dis- 



INSTITUTIONS 479 

dainful, to say that on most matters they were too un- 
instructecl, too powerless and too mute to contribute 
much to that body of sentiment called public opinion, 
one condition of which seems to be that to exist it must 
find expression. 

The Estates General, by whatever name they were influence 
called, supplemented in France by provincial bodies ggJaj^gg 
called Parlements partaking of the nature of high General 
courts of justice, and in Germany by the local Diets 
(Landtag) of the larger states, exercised a very real 
and in some cases a decisive influence on public policy. 
The monarch of half the world dared not openly defy 
the Cortes of Aragon or of Castile ; the imperious Tu- 
dors diligently labored to get parliamentary sanction 
for their tyrannical acts, and, on the few occasions 
when they could not do so, hastened to abandon as 
gracefully as possible their previous intentions. In 
Germany the power of the Diet was not limited by the 
emperor, but by the local governments, though even so 
it was considerable. When a Diet, under skilful ma- 
nipulation or by unscrupulous trickery, was induced by 
the executive to pass an unpopular measure, like the 
Edict of Worms, the law became a dead letter. In 
some other instances, notably in its long campaign 
against monopolies, even when it expressed the popular 
voice the Diet failed because the emperor was sup- 
ported by the wealthy capitalists. Only recently it has 
been revealed how the Fuggers of Augsburg and their 
allies endeavored to manipulate or to frustrate its 
work in the matter of government regulation of in- 
dustry and commerce. 

The finances of most countries were managed cor- Public 
ruptly and unwisely. The taxes were numerous and 
complicated and bore most heavily on the poor. From 
ordinary taxes in most countries the privileged orders 
were exempt, though they were forced to contribute 



480 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

special sums levied by themselves. The general prop- 
.- erty tax (taille) in France yielded 2,400,000 livres 
tournois in 1517 and 4,600,000 in 1543. The taxes were 
farmed ; that is, the right of collecting them was sold at 
auction, with the natural result that they were put into 
the hands of exto-rtioners who made vast fortunes by 
oppressing the people. Revenues of the royal domain, 
excises on salt and other articles, import and export 
duties, and the sale of offices and monopolies, supple- 
mented the direct taxes. The system of taxation va- 
ried in each country. Thus in Spain the 10 per cent, 
tax on the price of an article every time it was sold 
and the royalty on precious metals — 20 per cent, after 
1504 — proved important sources of revenue. Rome 
drove a lucrative trade in spiritual wares. Every- 
where, fines for transgressions of the law figured more 
largely as a source of revenue than they do nowadays. 
Wasteful Expenditures were both more wasteful and more nig- 

expendi- gardly than they are today. Though the service of the 
public debt was trifling compared with modem stand- 
ards, and though the administration of justice was not 
exiDensive because of the fee system, the army and navy 
cost a good deal, partly because they were composed 
largely of well paid mercenaries. The personal ex- 
travagances of the court were among the heaviest bur- 
dens borne by the people. The kings built palaces; 
they wallowed in cloth of gold; they collected objects 
of art; they squandered fortunes on mistresses and 
minions ; they made constant progresses with a retinue 
of thousands of servants and horses. The two great- 
est states, France and Spain, both went into bank- 
ruptcy in 1557. 
Public The great task of government, that of keeping public 

order order, protecting life and property and punishing the 

criminal, was approached by our forbears with more 
gusto than success. The laws were terrible, but they 



INSTITUTIONS 



481 



were unequally executed. In England among capital 
crimes were the following : murder, arson, escape from 
prison, hunting by night with painted faces or visors, 
embezzling property worth more than 40 shillings, 
carrying horses or mares into Scotland, conjuring, 
practising witchcraft, removing landmarks, desertion 
from the army, counterfeiting or mutilating coins, cat- 
tle-lifting, house-breaking, picking of pockets. All 
these were punished by hanging, but crimes of special 
heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burn- 
ing or boiling to death. The numerous laws against 
treason and heresy have already been described. Les- 
ser punishments included flogging, pillory, branding, 
the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and im- 
prisonment in dungeons made purposely as horrible as 
possible, dark, noisome dens without furniture or con- 
veniences, often too small for a man to stand upright 
or to lie at full length. 

"With such laws it is not sui"[')rising that 72,000 men Number of 
were hanged under Henry VIII, an average of nearly 
2,000 a year. The number at present, when the popu- 
lation of England and Wales has swollen to tenfold of 
what it was then, is negligible. Only nine men were 
hanged in the United Kingdom in the years 1901-3; 
about 5,000 are now on the average annually convicted 
of felony. If anything, the punishments were harsher 
on the Continent than in Britain. The only refuge of 
the criminal was the greed of his judges. At Kome it 
was easy and regular to pay a price for every crime, 
and at other places bribery was more or less prevalent. 

The methods of trying crimhials were as cruel as 
their punishments. On the Continent the presumption 
was held to be against the accused, and the rack and 
its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely 
used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that 
when men felt the pain they spoke the truth merely ex- 



executions 



Cruel 

trial 

methods 



482 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

pressed the current delusion, for legislators and 
judges, their hearts hardened in part by the example of 
the church, concurred in his opinion. The exceptional 
protest of Montaigne deserves to be quoted for its 
humanity: ''AH that exceeds simple death is absolute 
cruelty, nor can our laws expect that he whom the fear 
of decapitation or hanging will not restrain should be 
awed by imagining the horrors of a slow fire, burning 
pincers or breaking on the wheel." 

The spirit of the English law was against the use of 
torture, which, however, made progress, especially in 
state trials, under the Tudors. A man who refused to 
plead in an English court was subjected to the peine 
forte et dure, which consisted in piling weights on his 
chest until he either spoke or was crushed to death. 
To enforce the laws there was a constabulary in the 
country, supplemented by the regular army, and a 
police force in the cities. That of Paris consisted of 
240 archers, among them twenty-four mounted men. 
The inefficiency of some of the English officers is amus- 
ingly caricatured in the persons of Dogberry and Ver- 
ges who, when they saw a thief, concluded that he was 
no honest man and the less they had to meddle or 
make mth him the more for their honesty. 
Blue laws If) in all that has just been said, it is evident that 
the legislation of that period and of our own had the 
same conception of the function of government and 
only differed in method and efficiency, there was one 
very large class of laws spread upon the statute-books 
of medieval Europe that has almost vanished now. 
A paternal statesmanship sought to regulate the pri- 
vate lives of a citizen in every respect: the fashion 
of his clothes, the number of courses at his meals, 
how many guests he might have at wedding, diimer 
or dance, how long he should be permitted to haunt 
the tavern, and how much he should drink, how he 



INSTITUTIONS 483 

should spend Sunday, liow lie should become engaged, 
how dance, how part his hair and with how thick a 
stick ho should be indulged in the luxury of beating his 
wife. 

The ''blue laws," as such regulations on their moral 
side came to be called, were no Protestant innovation. 
The Lutherans hardly made any change whatever in 
this respect, but Calvin did give a new and biting in- 
tensity to the medieval spirit. His followers, the Puri- 
tans, in the next centur>% almost succeeded in reducing 
the staple of a Christian man's legitimate recreation to 
''seasonable meditation and prayer." But the idea 
originated long before the evolution of "the non-con- 
formist conscience." 

The fundamental cause of all this legislation was 
sheer conservatism. Primitive men and savages have Spirit 
so strong a feeling of the sanction of custom that they 
have, as Bagehot expresses it, fairly screwed them- 
selves down by their unreasoning demands for con- 
formity. A good deal of this spirit has survived 
throughout history and far more of it, naturally, was 
found four centuries ago than at present, when reason 
has proved a solvent for so many social institutions. 
There are a good many laws of the period under sur- 
vey — such as that of Nuremberg against citizens part- 
ing their hair — for which no discoverable basis can be 
found save the idea that new-fangled fashions should 
not be allowed. 

Economic reasons also played their part in the regu- 
lation of the habits of the people. Thus a law of Ed- 
ward VI, after a preamble setting forth that divers 
kinds of food are indifferent before God, nevertheless 
commands all men to cat fish as heretofore on fast days, 
not as a religious duty but to encourage fishermen, give 
them a livelihood and thus train men for the navy. 

A third very strong motive in the mind of the six- 



of con- 
servatism 



484 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

teenth-century statesmen, was that of differentiating 
the classes of citizens. The blue laws, if they may be 
so called in this case, were secretions of the blue blood. 
To make the vulgar know their places it was essential 
to make them dress according to their rank. The in- 
tention of An Act for the Reformation of excess in 

Apparel Apparel, passed by the English Parliament in 1532, 

^0 rank"^ was statcd to be, 

the necessary repressing and avoiding and expelling of 
the excess daily more used in the sumptuous and costly 
apparel and array accustomablj^ worn in this Realm, 
whereof hath ensued and daily do chance such sundry 
high and notorious detriments of the common weal, the 
subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and 
distinction of people according to their estates, pre- 
eminences, dignities and degrees to the utter impoverish- 
ment and undoing of many inexpert and light persons 
inclined to pride, mother of all vices. 

The tenor of the act prescribes the garb appropriate 
to the royal family, to nobles of different degree, to 
citizens according to their income, to servants and 
husbandmen, to the clergy, doctors of divinity, sol- 
diers, lawyers and players. Such laws were common 
in all countries. A Scotch act provides "that it be 
lauchful to na wemen to weir [clothes] abone [above] 
their estait except howries." This law was not only 
''apprevit" by King James VI, but endorsed with his 
own royal hand, ' ' This acte is verray gude. ' ' 

Excessive fare at feasts was provided against for 
similar reasons and Avith almost equal frequency. By 
1517 an English proclamation the number of dishes served 

was to be regulated according to the rank of the highest 
person present. Thus, if a cardinal was guest or host, 
there might be nine courses, if a lord of Parliament six, 
for a citizen with an income of five hundred j)ounds a 
year, three. Elsewhere the number of guests at all 



INSTITUTIONS 485 

ordinary functions as well as the number and price of 
gifts at weddings, christenings and like occasions, was 
prescribed. 

Games of chance were frequently forbidden. Fran- 1^26 
cis I ordered a lieutenant with twenty archers to visit 
taverns and gaming houses and arrest all players of 
cards, dice and other unlawful games. This did not 
prevent the establishment of a public lottery, a prac- 1539 
tice justified by alleging the examples of Italian cities 
in raising revenue by this means. Henry III forbade 
all games of chance "to minors and other debauched 1577 
persons," and this was followed six years later by a 
crushing impost on cards and dice, interesting as one 
of the first attempts to suppress the instruments of 
vice through the taxing power. Merry England also 
had many laws forbidding "tennis, bowles, dicing and 
cards," the object being to encourage the practice of 
archery. 

Tippling was the subject of occasional animadver- 
sion by the various governments, though there seemed 
to be little sentiment against it until the opening of 
the following centuiy. The regulation of the number 
of taverns and of the amount of wine that might be 
kept in a gentleman's cellar, as prescribed in an Eng- 
lish law, mentions not the moral but the economic as- ^^^^ 
pect of drinldng. The purchase of French wines was 
said to drain England of money. 

Though the theater also did not suffer much until 
the time of Cromwell, plays were forbidden in the 
precincts of the city of London. The Book of Disci- 
pline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. Cal- ^^^'^ 
vin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther 
considered them "fools' work" and at times danger- 
ous. 

Commendable efforts to suppress the practice of 
duelling were led by the Catholic church. Clement 



1551 



480 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

1524 VII forbade it in a bull, confirmed by a decree of the 

1563 Council of Trent. An extraordinarily worded French 

proclamation of 1566 forbade ''all gentlemen and 
others to give each other the lie and, if they do give 
each other the lie, to fight a duel about it." Other 
governments took the matter up very sluggishly. 
Scotland forbade ''the great liberty that sundry per- 
sons take in provoking each other to singular combats 
upon sudden and frivol occasions," without license 
from his majesty. 

Two matters on which the Puritans felt very keenly, 
blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking, were but scantily 
looked after in the century of the Reformation. Scot- 
land forbade "grievous and abominable oaths, swear- 
ing, execrations and blasphemation, " and somewhat 
similar laws can be found in other countries. Scot- 
land was also a pioneer in forbidding on the Sabbath 
all work, "gaming, playing, passing to taverns and ale- 
houses and wilful remaining away from the parish 
kirk in time of sermon. ' ' 

MaU Government has other functions than the enforce- 

ment of the civil and criminal law. Almost contempo- 
rary with the opening of the century was the establish- 
ment of post offices for the forv\^arding of letters. 
After Maximilian had made a start in the Netherlands 
other comitries were not slow to follow his example. 
Though under special government supervision at first 
these letter-carriers were private men. 

Sanitation In the Middle Ages there had been efforts to safe- 
guard public sanitation. The sixteenth century did 
not greatly improve on them. Thus, Geneva passed a 
law that garbage and other refuse should not be al- 
lowed to lie in the streets for more than three days in 
summer or eight days in winter. In extreme cases 
quarantine was adopted as a precaution against epi- 
demics. 



INSTITUTIONS 487 

It is the most heart-breaking or the most absurd fact ^^^r 
in human history, according as the elements involved 
are focused in a humane or in a cynical light, that the 
chief energies of government as well as the most zeal- 
ous forces of peoples, have been dedicated since civil- 
ization began to the practice of wholesale homicide. 
As we look back from the experience of the Great AVar 
to the conflicts of other times, they seem to our jaded 
imaginations almost as childish as they were vicious. 
In the sixteenth century, far more than in the nine- 
teenth, the nations boiled and bubbled with spleen and 
jealousy, hurled Thrasonical threats and hyperbolic 
boasts in each other's teeth, breathing out mutual ex- 
termination with no compunctious visitings of nature 
to stay their hungry swords — but when they came to 
blows they had not the powder of boys. The great na- 
tions were always fighting but never fought to a finish. 
In the whole century no national capital west of Hun- 
gary, save Kome and Edinburgh, was captured by an 
enemy. The real harm was not done on the battle- 
field, where the carnage was incredibly small, but in 
the raids and looting of to^^^l and country by the pro- 
fessional assassins who filled the ranks of the hireling 
troops. Then, indeed, cities were burned, wealth was 
plundered and destroyed, men were subjected to name- 
less tortures and women to indescribable outrages, and 
children were tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then 
to shock the jjublic conscience, as it has at last suc- 
ceeded in doing. The people saw nothing but dazzling 
glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken 
field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder 
of the captains and the shouting. Soldiers, said Lu- 
ther, founding his opinion on the canon law, might be 
in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as eat- 
ing, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like 
Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies 



488 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only 
Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaim- 
ing against war and once asserting that he agreed with 
Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to 
the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that wars of 
self-defence were necessary. 
Arms Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy 

in the period of Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late 
as 1596 an English soldier lamented that his country- 
men neglected the bow for the gun. Halberdiers with 
pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes 
inflicted very little damage, as at Floclden, sometimes 
considerable, as at Marignano, where, with the French 
cavalry, it struck down the till then almost invincible 
Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and muske- 
teers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon 
of a large type gave way to smaller field-guns ; even the 
idea of the machine-gun emerged in the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The name of them, "organs," was taken from 
their appearance with numerous barrels from which 
as many as fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. 
Cannon were transported to the field on carts. Eifles 
were invented b}^ a German in 1520, but not much 
used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia — 
whence the name — about 1540. Bombs were first used 
in 1588. 

The arts of fortification and of siege were improved 
together, many ingenious devices being called into 
being by the technically difficult war of the Spaniards 
against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as they 
afterwards became and of strategy there was no con- 
sistent theory. Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, 
based his ideas on the practice of Rome and therefore 
despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to cavalry. 
Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstand- 
ing which there were sporadic and often very annoying 



INSTITUTIONS 489 

mutinies. Paiiisliments were terrible, as in civil life. 
Blasphemy, cards, dicing, duelling and women were 
forbidden in most regular armies, but in time of war 
the soldiers were allowed an incredible license in pil- 
laging and in foraging. Rings and other decorations 
Avere given as rewards of valor. Uniforms began first 
to be introduced in England by Henry VIII. 

The personnel of the armies was extremely bad. Not Personnel 
counting the small number of criminals who were al- " '^.*^ 

® ^ ... armies 

lowed to expiate their misdeeds by military service, the 
rank and file consisted of mercenaries who only too 
rapidly became criminals under the tutelage of Mars. 
There were a few conscripts, but no universal training 
such as Machiavelli recommended. The officers were 
nobles or gentlemen wiio served for the prestige and 
glory of the profession of arms, as well as for the good 
pay. 

But the most striking difference between armies Size of 
then and now is not in their armament nor in their 
quality but in the size. Great battles were fought and 
whole campaigns decided with twenty or thirty thou- 
sand troops. The French standing army was fixed 
by the ordinance of 1534 at seven legions of six thou- 
sand men each, besides which were the mercenaries, 
the whole amounting to a maximum, under Francis I, 
of about 100,000 men. The English official figures 
about 1588 gave the army 90,000 foot soldiers and 9000 
horse, but these figures were grossly exaggerated. In 
fact only 22,000 men w^ere serviceable at the crisis of 
England's war with Spain. Other armies were pro- 
portionately small. The janizaries, whose interven- 
tion often decided battles, numbered in 1520 only 
12,000. They were perhaps the best troops in Europe, 
as the Turkish artillery was the most powerful known. 
What all these figures show, in short, is that the phe- 
nomenon of nations with every man physically fit in 



armies com- 
pared 



490 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

the army, engaging in a death grapple until one goes 
down in complete exhaustion, is a modem develop- 
ment. 
Sea power The influence of sea power upon history has become 
proverbial, if, indeed, it has not been overestimated 
since Admiral Mahan first wTote. It may be pointed 
out that this influence is far from a constant factor. 
Sea power had a considerable importance in the wars 
of Greece and of Rome, but in the Middle Ages it be- 
came negligible. Only with the opening of the seven 
seas to navigation was the command of the waves 
found to secure the avenues to wealth and colonial ex- 
pansion. In Portugal, Spain, and England, ' ' the blue 
water school" of mariners speedily created navies 
whose strife was apparently more decisive for the fu- 
ture of history than were the battles of armies on land. 
When the trade routes of the Atlantic superseded 
those of the Mediterranean in importance, naturally 
methods of navigation changed, and this involved a 
revolution in naval warfare greater than that caused 
by steam or by the submarine. From the time that 
Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships until the 
battle of Lepanto, the oar had been the chief instru- 
ment of locomotion, though supplemented, even from 
Homeric times, by the sail. Naval battles were like 
those on land; the enemy keels approached and the 
soldiers on each strove to board and master the other's 
crew. The only distinctly naval tactic was that of 
'' ramming," as it was called in a once vivid metaphor. 
But the wild winds and boisterous waves of the At- 
lantic broke the oar in the galley-slave 's hand and the 
muscles in his back. Once again man harnessed the 
hostile forces of nature ; the free breezes were broken 
to the yoke and new types of sailing ships were driven 
at racing speed across the broad back of the sea. 
Swift, yare vessels were built, at first smaller than the 



\ 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 491 

old galleons but infinitely more manageable. And the 
new boats, armed with thunder as they were clad with 
wings, no longer sought to sink or capture enemies at 
close quarters, but hurled destruction from afar. 
Heavy guns took the place of small weapons and of 
armed prow. 

It was England's genius for the sea that enabled her 
to master the new conditions first and most completely 
and that placed the trident in her hands so firmly that 
no enemy has ever been able to wrest it from her. 
Henry VIII paid great attention to the navy. He had 
fifty-three vessels with an aggregate of 11,268 tons, 
an average of 200 tons each, carrying 1750 soldiers, 
1250 sailors and 2085 guns. Under Elizabeth the num- 
ber of vessels had sunk to 42, but the tonnage had risen 
to 17,055, and the crews numbered 5534 seamen, 804 
gunners and 2008 soldiers. The largest ships of the 
Tudor navy were of 1000 tons ; the flagship of the Span- 
ish Armada was 1150 tons, carrying 46 guns and 422 
men. How tiny are these figures! A single cruiser 
of today has a larger tonnage than the w^hole of Eliza- 
beth's fleet; a large submarine is greater than the 
monsters of Philip, 

§ 4. Private Life and Manners 

Of all the forces making for equality among men 
probably the education of the masses by means of 
cheap books and papers has been the strongest. But 
this force has been slow to ripen; at the close of the 
Middle Ages the common man was still helpless. The 
old privileged orders were indeed weakened and de- 
spoiled of part of their prerogatives, but it was chiefly 
by the rise of a new aristocracy, that of wealth. 

The decay of feudalism and of ecclesiastical privilege ^o^'l^y 
took the form of a changed and not of an abolished 
position for peer and priest. They were not cashiered, 



492 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

but they were retained on cheaper terms. The feudal 
baron had been a petty king; his descendant had the 
option of becoming either a highwayman or a courtier. 
As the former alternative became less and less reward- 
ing, the greater part of the old nobles abandoned their 
pretensions to independence and found a congenial 
sphere as satellities of a monarch, ''Ic roi soleil," as a 
typical king was aptly called, whose beams they re- 
flected and around whom^they circled. 

As titles of nobility began now to be quite com- 
monly given to men of wealth and also to politicians, 
the old blood Avas renewed at the expense of the ancient 
pride. Not, indeed, that the latter showed any signs 
of diminishing. The arrogance of the noble was past 
all toleration. Men of rank treated the common cit- 
izens like dirt beneath their feet, and even regarded 
artists and other geniuses as menials. Alphonso, 
duke of Ferrara, wrote to Eaphael in terms that no 
king would now use to a photographer, calling him a 
liar and chiding him for disrespect to his superior. 
The same duke required Ariosto to prostitute his 
genius by writing an apology for a fratricide com- 
mitted by his grace. The duke of Mayenne po- 
niarded one of his most devoted followers for having 
aspired to the hand of the duke^s widowed daughter- 
in-law. So difficult was it to conceive of a "gentle- 
man" without gentle blood that Castigiione, the ar- 
biter of manners, lays down as the first prerequisite to 
a perfect courtier that he shall be of high birth. And 
of course those who had not this advantage pretended 
to it. An Italian in London noticed in 1557 that all 
gentlemen without other title insisted on being called 
'* mister." 
Professions One sigu of the break-up of the old medieval castes 
was the new classification of men by calling, or pro- 
fession. It is true that two of the professions, the 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 493 

higher offices in arm,y and church, became apanages 
of the nobility, and the other liberal vocations were 
almost as completely monopolized by the children of 
the moneyed middle class ; nevertheless it is significant 
that there were new roads by which men might rise. 
No class has profited more by the evolution of ideas 
than has the intelligentsia. From a subordinate, semi- 
menial position, lawyers, physicians, educators and 
journalists, not to mention artists and writers, have be- 
come the leading, almost the ruling, body of our w^est- 
ern democracies. 

Half way between a medieval estate and a modern Clergy 
calling stood the clergy. In Catholic countries they 
remained very numerous ; there were 136 episcopal or 
archiepiscopal sees in France ; there were 40,000 parish 
priests, with, an equal number of secular clergy in sub- 
ordinate positions, 24,000 canons, 34,000 friars, 2500 
Jesuits (in 1600), 12,000 monks and 80,000 nuns. 
Though there were doubtless many worthy men among 
them, it cannot honestly be said that the average were 
fitted either morally or intellectually for their posi- 
tions. Grossly ignorant of the meaning of the Latin 
in which they recited their masses and of the main 
articles of their faith, many priests made up for these 
defects by proficiency in a variety of superstitious 
charms. The public was accustomed to see nuns danc- 
ing at bridals and priests haunting taverns and worse 
resorts. Some attempts, serious and partially success- 
ful, at reform, have been already described. Profane 
and amatory pla3's were forbidden in nunneries, bull- 
fights were banished from the Vatican and the dangers 
of the confessional were diminished by the invention 
of the closed box in which the priest should sit and 
hear his penitent through a small aperture instead of 
having her kneeling at his knees. So depraved was 
public opinion on the subject of the confession that a 



494 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



prolonged controversy took place in Spain as to 
whether minor acts of impurity perpetrated by the 
priest while confessing women were permissible or not. 
Conditions Neither was the average Protestant clergyman a 
Protestant shining and a burning light. So little was the calling 
clergy regarded that it was hard to fill it. At one time a third 

of the parishes of England were said to lack incum- 
bents. The stipends were wretched; the social posi- 
tion obscure. The wives of the new clergy had an 
especially hard lot, being regarded by the people as 
little better than concubines, and by Parliament called 
* 'necessary evils." The English government had to 
issue injunctions in 1559 stating that because of the 
offence that has come from the type of women com- 
monly selected as helpmates by parsons, no manner of 
priest or deacon should presume to marry without 
consent of the bishop, of the girl 's parents, "or of her 
master or mistress where she serveth. ' ' Many clergy- 
men, nevertheless, afterwards married domestics. 

Very little was done to secure a properly trained 
ministry. Less than half of the 2000 clergymen or- 
dained at Wittenberg from 1537-60 were university 
men; the majority were drapers, tailors and cobblers, 
''common idiots and laymen" as they were called — 
though the word "idiot" did not have quite the same 
disparaging sense that it has now. Nor were the rev- 
erend gentlemen of unusually high character. As 
nothing was demanded of them but purity of doctrine, 
purity of life sank into the background. It is really 
amazing to see how an acquaintance of Luther's suc- 
ceeded in getting one church after he had been dis- 
missed from another on well-founded charges of se- 
duction, and how he was thereafter convicted of rape. 
This was perhaps an extreme case, but that the 
majority of clergymen were morally unworthy is the 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 495 

melancholy conviction borne in by contemporary rec- 
ords. 

Sermons were long, doctrinal and political. Cran- Character 

. , , of sermons 

mer advised Latimer not to preach more than an nour 
and a half lest the king grow weary. How the popular 
preacher — in this case a Catholic — appealed to his au- 
dience, is worth quoting from a sermon delivered at 
Landau in 1550. 

The Lutherans [began the reverend gentleman] are op- 
posed to the worship of INIary and the saints. Now, ray 
friends, be good enough to listen to me. The soul of a 
man who had died got to the door of heaven and Peter 
shut it in his face. Luckily, the Mother of God was tak- 
ing a stroll outside with her sweet Son. The deceased 
addresses her and reminds her of the Paters and Aves he 
has recited in her glory and the candles he has burnt be- 
fore her images. Thereupon Mary says to Jesus : ''It's 
the honest truth, my Son." The Lord, however, objected 
and addressed the suppliant: "Ilast thou never heard 
that I am the way and the door to life everlasting?" he 
asks. "If thou art the door, I am the window," retorted 
Mary, taking the ''soul" by the hair and flinging it 
through the open casement. And now I ask 3'ou whether 
it is not the same whether you enter Paradise by the door 
or by the window ? 

There was a naive familiarity with sacred things in 
our ancestors that cannot be imitated. Who would 
now name a ship ** Jesus," as Hawkins's buccaneering 
slaver was named? What serious clergyman would 
now compare three of his friends to the Father, the 
Son and the Holy Ghost, as did Luther? The Refonner 
also wrote a satire on the calling of a council, in the 
form of a letter from the Holy Ghost signed by Gabriel 
as notary and witnessed by Michael the Provost of 
Paradise and Raphael, God's Court Physician. At 
another time he made a lampoon on the collection of 



496 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

relics made by his enemy the Archbishop of Mayence, 
stating that they contained such things as ''a fair piece 
of Moses' left horn, a whole pound of the wind that 
blew for Elijah in the cave on Mount Horeb and two 
feathers and an egg of the Holy Ghost" as a dove. All 
this, of course, not in ribald profanity, but in works in- 
tended for edification. . . . 

The city Though beautiful, the city of our ancestors was far 

from admirable in other ways. Filth was hidden un- 
der its comely garments, so that it resembled a Cos- 
sack prince — all ermine and vermin. Its narrow 
streets, huddled between strong walls, were over-run 
with pigs and chickens and filled with refuse. They 
were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and slush in 
winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at 
night, infested with princes and young nobles on a 
spree and with other criminals. 

The house Like the exterior, the interior of the house of a 
substantial citizen was more pretty than clean or sweet 
smelling. The high wainscoting and the furniture, in 
various styles, but frequently resembling what is now 
known as ''mission," was lovely, as were the orna- 
ments — tapestries, clocks, pictures and flowers. But 
the place of carpets were supplied by rushes renewed 
from time to time without disturbing the underlying 
mass of rubbish beneath. Windows were fewer than 
they are now, and fires still fewer. Sometimes there 
was an open hearth, sometimes a huge tile stove. 
Most houses had only one or two rooms heated, some- 
times, as in the case of the Augustinian friary at "Wit- 
tenberg, only the bathroom, but usually also the living 
room. 

Dress The dress of the people was far more various and 

picturesque than nowadays. Both sexes dressed in 
gaudy colors and delighted in strange fashions, so that, 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 497 

as Roger Ascliam said, ''lie thonglit himself most brave 
that was most monstrous in misorder." For women 
the fashion of decollete was just coming in, as so many- 
fashions do, from the demi-monde. To Catharine de' 
Medici is attributed the invention of the corset, an 
atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need of 
one. 

The day began at five in summer and at seven in Food 
winter. A heavy breakfast was followed by a heavier 
dinner at ten, and supper at five, and there were be- 
tween times two or three other tiffins or ''drink- 
ings.^' The staple food was meat and cereal; very 
few of our vegetables were known, though some were 
just beginning to be cultivated. The most valuable 1585-6 
article of food introduced from the new world was the 
potato. Another importation that did not become 
thoroughly acclimatized in Europe was the turkey. 
Even now thej^ are rare, but there are several interest- 
ing allusions to them in the literature of that time, one 
of the year 1533 in Luther's table talk. Poultry of 
other sorts was common, as were eggs, game and fish. 
The cooking relied for its highest effects on sugar and 
spices. The ordinary fruits — apples, cherries and 
oranges — furnished a wholesome and pleasing variety 
to the table. Knives and spoons were used in eat- 
ing, but forks were unknown, at least in northern Eu- 
rope. 

All the victuals were washed down with copious po- Drink 
tations. A water-drinker, like Sir Thomas More, was 
the rarest of exceptions. The poor drank chiefly beer 
and ale; the mildest sort, known as ''small beer," was 
recommended to the man suffering from too strong 
drink of the night before. AVine was more priz.ed, and 
there were a number of varieties. There being no 
champagne, Burgundy was held in high esteem, as were 
some of the strong, sweet, Spanish and Portuguese 



1573 



498 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

wines. The most harmless drinks were claret and 
Rhine wine. There were some * 'mixed drinks," such 
as sack or hippocras, in which beer or wine was so- 
phisticated with eggs, spices and sugar. The quanti- 
ties habitually drunk were large. Roger Ascham re- 
cords that Charles V drank the best he ever saw, never 
less than a quart at a draft. The breakfast table of an 
English nobleman was set out vv'ith a quart of wine and 
a quart of beer, liquor then taking the place of tea, cof- 
fee, chocolate and all the *'soft" beverages that now 
furnish stimulation and sociability. 
Tobacco, ''In these times," wrote Harrison, ''the taking-in of 

the smoke of an Indian herb called ' Tobaco ' by an in- 
strument formed like a little ladle ... is greatly taken 
up and used in England against rewmes [colds] and 
some other diseases." Like other drugs, tobacco soon 
came to be used as a narcotic for its own sake, and was 
presently celebrated as "divine tobacco" and "our 
holy herb nicotian" by the poets. What, indeed, are 
smoking, drinking, and other wooings of pure sensa- 
tion at the sacrifice of power and reason, but a sort 
of pragmatized poetry? Some ages, and those the 
most poetical, like that of Pericles and that of Rabe- 
lais, have deified intoxication and sensuality; others, 
markedly our own, have preferred the accumulation of 
wealth and knowledge to sensual indulgence. It is a 
psychological contrast of importance. 

Could we be suddenly transported on Mr. Wells's 
time machine four hundred years back we should be 
less struck by what our ancestors had than by what 
they lacked. Quills took the place of fountain pens, 
pencils, typewriters and dictaphones. Not only was 
postage dearer but there were no telephones or tele- 
grams to supplement it. The world's news of yes- 
terday, which we imbibe with our morning cup, then 
sifted do^vn slowly through various media of com- 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 499 

munication, mostly oral. It was two months after the 
battle before Philip of Spain knew the fate of his 
own Armada. The houses had no steam heat, no ele- 
vators; the busy housewife was aided by no vacuum 
cleaner, sewing machine and gas ranges; the business 
man could not ride to his office, nor the farmer to his 
market, in automobiles. There were neither railways 
nor steamships to make travel rapid and luxurious. 

Nevertheless, journeys for purposes of piety, pleas- "^"^^^ 
ure and business were common. Pilgrimages to Jeru- 
salem, Rome, Compostella, Loretto, Walsingham and 
many other shrines were frequent in Catholic coun- 
tries. Students were perpetually wandering from one 
university to another; merchants were on the road, 
and gentlemen felt the attractions of sight-seeing. 
The cheap and common mode of locomotion was on 
foot. Boats on the rivers and horses on land fur- 
nished the alternatives. The roads were so poor that 
the horses were sometimes ** almost shipwrecked." 
The trip from Worms to Rome commonly took twelve 
days, but could be made in seven. Xavier's voyage 
from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen months. Inns were 
good in France and England ; less pleasant elsewhere. 
Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, 
where a large living and dining room would be heated 
to a high temperature by a stove around which trav- 
elers would dry their steaming garments. The smells 
caused by these operations, together with the fleas and 
mice with which the poorer inns were infested, made 
the stay anything but luxurious. Any complaint was 
met by the retort, ''If you don't like it, go somewhere 
else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the 
traveller was escorted to his bedroom, he found it very 
cold in winter, though the featherbeds kept him warm 
enough. He would see his chamber filled with other 
beds occupied by his travelling companions of both 



500 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

sexes, and he himself was often forced to share his bed 
with a stranger. The custom of the time was to take 
one bath a week. For this there were public bath- 
Baths houses, frequented by both sexes. A common form of 

entertainment was the "bath-party." 
Sports With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed 

in other matters the contemporaries of Luther and 
Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never has the 
theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear- 
baiting and bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also 
much relished, though humane men like Luther and 
More protested against the '^silly and woeful beastes' 
slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that 
there were 250 courts in Paris alone. The game was 
different from the modern in that the courts were 121 
feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden balls and 
"bats" — as racquets are still called in England — 
were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately 
played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being 
the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played nearly 
as now. 

Young people loved dances and some older people 
shook their heads over them, then as now. Melanch- 
thon danced, at the age of forty-four, and Luther ap- 
proved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a 
means of bringing young people together. On the 
other hand dances were regulated in many states and 
prohibited in others, like Zurich and Geneva. Some 
of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others 
were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, 
embraced and whirled around giddily by their part- 
ners. The Scotch ambassador's comment that Queen 
Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an impression of 
agility that would hardly now be considered in the best 
taste. 

The veneer of courtesy was thin. True, humanists, 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 501 

publicists and authors composed for each other eulo- Manners 
gies that would have been hyperboles if addressed to 
the morning- stars singing at the dawn of creation, but 
once a quarrel had been started among the touchy race 
of writers and a spouting geyser of inconceivable scur- 
rility burst forth. No imagery was too nasty, no 
epithet too strong, no charge too base to bring against 
an opponent. The heroic examples of Greek and 
Roman invective paled before the inexhaustible re- 
sources of learned billingsgate stored in the minds of 
the humanists and theologians. To accuse an enemy 
of atheism and heresy was a matter of course ; to add 
charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories 
of suicide and of the devils hovering greedily over his 
deathbed, was extremely common. Even cro^vned 
heads exchanged similar amenities. 

Withal, there was growing up a strong appreciation 
of the merits of courtesy. Was not Bayard, the cap- 
tain in the army of Francis I a ''knight without fear 
and w^ithout reproach"? Did not Sir Philip Sidney 
do one of the perfect deeds of gentleness when, dying 
on the battle field and tortured w^tli thirst, he passed 
his cup of water to a common soldier with the simple 
w^ords, ' ' Thy need is greater than mine ' ' ? One of the 
most justly famous and most popular books of the 
sixteenth century was Baldessare Castiglione's Book of 
the Courtier, called by Dr. Johnson the best treatise on 
good breeding ever written. Published in Italian in 
1528, it was translated into Spanish in 1534, into 
French in 1537, into English and Latin in 1561, and 
finally into German in 1566. There have been of it 
more tliaii 140 editions. It sots forth an ideal of a 
Prince Charming, a man of noble birth, export in games 
and in war, brave, modest, unaffected, witty, an ele- 
gant speaker, a good dancer, familiar with literature 
and accomplished in music, as well as a man of honor 



502 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

and courtesy. It is significant that this ideal appealed 
to the time, though it must be confessed it was rarely 
reached. Ariosto, to whom the first book was dedi- 
cated by the author, depicts, as his ideals, knights in 
whom the sense of honor has completely replaced all 
Christian virtues. They were always fighting each 
other about their loves, much like the bulls, lions, rams 
and dogs to whom the poet continually compares them. 
Even the women Avere hardly safe in their company. 

Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character 
as no long description will do. The following are typ- 
ical of the manners of our forbears : 

One winter morning a stately matron was ascending 
the steps of the church of St. Gudule at Brussels. 
They were covered with ice; she slipped and took a 
precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of 
the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped 
her lips. When the laughing bystanders, among whom 
w^as Erasmus, helped her to her feet, she beat a hasty 
retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do not 
have such a vocabulary at their tongue 's end. 

The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at 
Eome calling on Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, 
though of the demi-monde, lived like a princess, culti- 
vated letters and art, and had many poets as well as 
many nobles among her friends. Her floors were 
carpeted with velvet rugs, her walls hung with golden 
cloth, and her tables loaded with costly bric-a-brac. 
The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat copi- 
ously in the face of his lackey and then explained to 
the slightly startled company that he chose this ob- 
jective rather than soil the splendor he saw around 
him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate and suc- 
cessful flattery. 
1538 Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain 

Simon Lemchen, or Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 503 

sort who published two volumes of scurrilous epigrams 
bringing unfounded and nasty charges against Luther, 
iMelanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives. 
When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Lu- 
ther revenged himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, 
partly by composing, for circulation among his friends, 
some verses about Lemnius in which the scurrility and 
obscenity of the offending youth were well over- 
trumped. One would be surprised at similar measures 
taken by a professor of divinity today. 

In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics Morals 
are not applicable; or, at any rate, it is probably tnie 
that the general impression one gets of the moral tone 
of any period is more trustworthy than would be got 
from carefully compiled figures. And that one does 
get such an impression, and a very strong one, is un- 
deniable. Everyone has in his mind a more or less 
distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient Athens, 
of Rome, of the ]\Iiddle Ages, the Renaissance, the 
Puritan Commonw^ealth, the Restoration, the Victorian 
Age. 

The sixteenth century was a time when morals 
were perhaps not much worse than they are now, but 
when vice and crime were more flaunted and talked 
about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done 
their best to conceal the corruption and indecency 
beneath the surface. But our ancestors had no such 
delicacy. The naive frankness of the age, both when 
it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives 
a full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking 
now. The large average consumption of alcohol — a 
certain irritant to moral maladies — and the unequal ad- 
ministration of justice, with laws at once savage and 
corruptly dispensed, must have had bad conse- 
quences. 

The Reformation had no permanent discernible ef- 



504 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



Violence 



Brigandage 



feet on moral standards. Aceompanicd as it often was 
with a temporary zeal for righteousness, it was too 
often followed by a breaking up of conventional stand- 
ards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of char- 
acter, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the 
English Reformation had been followed by a wave of 
wickedness. Luther said that when the devil of the 
papacy had been driven out, seven other devils entered 
to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was 
considered quite a saint who could say that he had not 
broken the first commandment, but only the other nine. 
Much of this complaint must be set down to disap- 
pointment at not reaching perfection, and over against 
it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits 
assured by the reform. 

It was an age of violence. Murder was common 
everywhere. On the slightest provocation a man of 
spirit was expected to whip out a rapier or dagger 
and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of un- 
faithful wives was an especial point of honor. Benve- 
nuto Cellini boasts of several assassinations and nu- 
merous assaults, and he himself got oif without a 
scratch from the law. Pope Paul III graciously pro- 
testing that ''men unique in their profession, like 
Benvenuto, were not subject to the laws." The num- 
ber of unique men must have been large in the Holy 
City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen 
more than a hundred bodies of persons foully done to 
death thrown into the Tiber, and no one bothered 
about it. 

Brigandage stall^ed unabashed through the whole 
of Europe. By 1585 the number of bandits in the 
papal states alone had risen to 27,000. Sixtus V took 
energetic means to repress them. One of his strata- 
gems is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had 
a train of mules loaded with poisoned food and then 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 505 

drove them along a road he knew to be infested by 
highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually took 
them and ate of the food, of which many died. 

Other countries were perhaps less scourged by rob- 
bers, but none was free. Erasmus's praise of Henry 
VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his realm of free- 
l)ooters, was premature. In the wilder parts, espe- 
cially on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 
1529 the Armstrongs of Lidderdale, just over the bor- 
der, could boast that they had burned 52 churches, 
besides making heavy depredations on private prop- 
erty. When James V took stern measures to suppress 1532 
them, and instituted a College of Justice for that pur- 
pose, the good law was unpopular. 

Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered 
through France, Spain and the Netherlands. The 
worst robbers in Germany were the free knights. 
From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage 
peaceful villages and trains of merchandise gohig from 
one walled city to another. In doing so they inflicted 
wanton mutilations on the unfortunate merchants 
whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even the 
greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not 
ashamed to *4et their horses bite off travellers' 
purses" now and then. But it was not only the nobles 
who became gentlemen of the road. A w^ell-to-do 
merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, w^as robbed 
of a couple of horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing 
to get redress in the corrupt courts, threw down the 
gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a procla- 
mation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until 
he was given compensation for his loss. For six years 1534-40 
he maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally 
taken and executed in Brandenburg. 

Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than Fraud 
force. When Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned the- 



506 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

ory the practice of all hypocrisy and guile, the courts 
of Europe were only too ready to listen to his advice. 
In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at deception 
to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but 
ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to 
debase the currency of good faith in every possible 
way. There was also much untruth in private life. 
Unfortunately, lying in the interests of piety was jus- 
tified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting 
art of equivocation. 

Unchastity The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a re- 
action against the asceticism of the Middle Ages. Lu- 
ther proclaimed that chastity was impossible, while the 
humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion was not 
scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally 
debated whether fornication w^as a sin, and the Italians 

c. 1500 now began to call a harlot a ''courteous woman" 
(courtesan) as they called an assassin a "brave man" 
(bravo). Augustine had said that harlots were rem- 
edies against worse things, and the church had not only 
winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them her- 
self. Bastardy was no bar to hereditary right in Italy. 
The Eeformers tried to make a clean sweep of the 
** social evil." Under Luther's direction brothels 
were closed in the reformed cities. When this was 
done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, 
stating that they had pursued their profession not 
from liking but only to earn bread, and asked for hon- 
est work. Serious attempts were made to give it to 
them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some 
other cities the brothels were left open, but were put 
under the supervision of an officer who was to see that 
no married men frequented them. The reformers had 
a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases. 
Other countries followed Germany in their war on the 
prostitute. In London the public houses of ill fame 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 507 

were closed in 3546, in Paris in 15G0. An edict of 
July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to leave Rome, 
but Avhen 25,000 persons, including the women and their 
dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue in- 
duced the pope to allow them to return on August 17 
of the same year. 

One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth cen- Polygamy 
tury, as it seems to us, was the persistent advocacy of 
polygamy as, if not desirable in itself, at least pref- 
erable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of marriage 
was not hard to obtain by people of influence, Avhether 
Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult mat- 
ter than it is in America now. In Scotland there was 
indeed a sort of trial marriage, knoA\Ti as ''handfast- 
ing," by which the parties might live together for a 
year and a day and then continue as married or sep- 
arate. But, beginning with Luther, many of the Re- 
formers thought polygamy less wrong than divorce, on 
the biblical ground that whereas the former had been 
practised in the Old Testament times and was not 
clearly forbidden by the New Testament, divorce was 
prohibited save for adultery. Luther advanced this 
thesis as early as 1520, when it was purely theoretical, 
but he did not shrink from api^lying it on occasion. 
It is extraordinary what a large body of reputable 
opinion was prepared to tolerate polygamy, at least in 
exceptional cases. Popes, theologians, humanists like 
Erasmus, and philosophers like Bruno, all thought a 
plurality of wives a natural condition. 

But all the while the instincts of the masses were Marriage 
sounder in this respect than the precepts of their 
guides. While polygamy remained a freakish and ex- 
ceptional practice, the passions of the age were ab- 
sorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. 
^Matrimony having been just restored to its proper 
dignity as the best estate for man, its praises were 



508 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained true 
to her preference for celibacy, but the Inquisition 
found much business in suppressing the then common 
opinion that marriage was better than virginity. To 
the Reformers marriage was not only the necessary 
condition of happiness to mankind, but the typically 
holy estate in which God's service could best be done. 
From all sides paeans arose celebrating matrimony as 
the true remedy for sin and also as the happiest estate. 
The delights of wedded love are celebrated equally in 
Luther's table talk and letters and in the poems of the 
Italian humanist Pontano. **I have always been of 
the opinion," writes Ariosto, ''that without a wife at 
his side no man can attain perfect goodness or live 
without sin." *'In marriage there is one mind in two 
bodies," says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, ''one har- 
mony, the same sorrows, the same joys, an identical 
will, common riches, poverty and honors, the same bed 
and the same table. . . . Only a husband and wife can 
love each other infinitely and serve each other as long 
as both do live, for no love is either so vehement or 
so holy as theirs." 

The passion for marriage in itself is witnessed by 
Remarriage the practice of widows and widowers of remarrying as 
soon and as often as possible. Luther's friend, Justus 
Jonas, married thrice, each time with a remark to the 
effect that it was better to marry than to burn. The 
English Bishop Eichard Cox excused his second mar- 
riage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lament- 
ing that he had not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis 
Rosenblatt married in succession Louis Keller, Oeco- 
lampadius, Capito and Bucer, the ecclesiastical emi- 
nence of her last three husbands giving her, one would 
think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More 
married a second wife just one month after his first 
wife's death. 



common 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 509 

Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's hap- Treatment 
piness were frequently ill treated after they were won. 
In the sixteenth century women were still treated as 
minors ; if married they could make no will ; their hus- 
bands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was 
no cause for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life 
is lauded by Erasmus as a very paragon, because "he 
got more compliance from his wife b}' jokes and bland- 
ishments than most husbands by imperious harsh- 
ness." One of these jokes, a customary one, was that 
his wife was neither pretty nor young; one of the 
*' blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram b}^ Sir 
Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy 
burden she might be useful if she would die and leave 
her husband money. In Utopia, he assures us, hus- 
bands chastise their wives. 

In the position of women various currents crossed Position of 
each other. The old horror of the temptress, inher- 
ited from the early church, the lofty scorn exhibited by 
the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of chiv- 
alry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity 
of woman and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated 
women like spoiled children; the humanists delighted 
to rake up the old jibes at them in musty authors ; the 
divines were hardest of all in their judgment. ''Na- 
ture doth paint them forth," says John Knox of 
women, "to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and fool- 
ish, and experience hath declared them to be uncon- 
stant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council 
and regimen." "If women bear children until they 
become sick and eventually die," preaches Luther, 
"that does no harm. Let them bear children till they 
die of it ; that is what they are for." In 1595 the ques- 
tion was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women 
were human beings. The general tone was one of dis- 
paragement. An anthology might be made of the 



woman 



510 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

proverbs recommending (a la Nietzsche) the whip as 
the best treatment for the sex. 

But withal there was a certain chivalry that revolted 
against all this brutalitj''. Castiglione champions 
courtesy and kindness to women on the highest and 
most beautiful ground, the spiritual value of woman's 
love. Ariosto sings: 

No doubt they are accurst and past all grace 
That dare to strike a damsel in the face, 
Or of her head to minish but a hair. 

Certain works like T. Elyot's Defence of Good Women 
and like Cornelius Agrippa's Nobility and Excellence 
of the Female Sex, witness a genuine appreciation of 
woman's worth. Some critics have seen in the last 
named work a paradox, like the Praise of Folly, such as 
was dear to the humanists. To me it seems absolutely 
sincere, even when it goes so far as to proclaim that 
woman is as superior to man as man is to beast and to 
celebrate her as the last and supreme work of the cre- 
ation. 
Children The family was far larger, on the average, in the 

sixteenth century than it is now. One can hardly think 
of any man in this generation with as many as a dozen 
children ; it is possible to mention several of that time 
with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nu- 
remberg printer had twenty -five children, eight by his 
first and seventeen by his second wife. Albert Diirer 
was the third of eighteen children of the same couple, 
of whom apparently only three reached maturity. 
John Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two 
brothers and sisters of whom by 1499 he was the only 
survivor. Of course these families were exceptional, 
but not glaringly so. A brood of six to twelve was a 
very common occurrence. 

Children were brought up harshly in many families, 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 511 

strictly in almost all. Thoy were not expected to sit 
in the presence of their parents, unless asked, or to 
speak unless spoken to. They must needs bow and 
crave a blessing twice a day. Lady Jane Grey com- 
plained that if she did not do everything as perfectly 
as God made the world, she was bitterly taunted and 
presently so nipped and pinched by her noble parents 
that she thought herself in hell. The rod was much 
resorted to. And yet there was a good deal of natural 
affection. Few fathers have even been better to their 
babies than was Luther, and he humanely advised 
others to rely as much on reward as on punishment — 
on the apple as on the switch — and above all not to 
chastise the little ones so harshly as to make them fear 
or hate their parents. 

The patria potestas was supposed to extend, as it did 
in Rome, during the adult as during the callow years. 
Especially did public opinion insist on children marry- 
ing according to the wishes of their parents. Among 
the nobilit}^ child-marriage was common, a mere form, 
of course, not at once followed by cohabitation. A be- 
trothal was a very solemn thing, amounting to a def- 
inite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed the en- 
gaged coujole, by law in Sweden and by custom in many 
other countries. All the more necessary, in the opin- 
ion of the time, to prevent youths and maidens be- 
trothing themselves without their parents' consent. 

Probably the standard of health is now higher than Health 
it was then, and the average longevity greater. It is 
true that few epidemics have ever been more fatal than 
the recent influenza; and on the other hand one can 
point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men 
who reached a crude and green old age. Statistics 
were then few and unreliable. In 1905 the death-rate 
in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years 1861- 
1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been calcu- 



512 SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

latccl that this is just what the death-rate was in Lon- 
don in a healthy year under Elizabeth, but it must be 
remembered that a year without some sort of epidemic 
was almost exceptional. 
Epidemics Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and hor- 
ribly fatal. Many of the figures given — as that 200,000 
people perished in Moscow in 1570, 50,000 at Lyons in 
1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7, 
must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea 
of the popular idea of the prevalent mortality. An- 
other scourge was the sweating sickness, first noticed 
as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507, 1517, 1528 
and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread 
in the sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but 
it figured less prominently on account of worse diseases 
and because it was seldom recognized until the last 
stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it was by 
vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of 
zymotic diseases, such as measles, which only began 
to be recognized as different in the course of the six- 
teenth century. One disease almost characteristic of 
former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them, 
due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the 
stone. 

Venereal diseases became so prominent in the six- 
teenth century that it has often been thought that the 
syphilis was imported from America. This, however, 
has been denied by authorities who believe that it came 
down from classical antiquity, but that it was not dif- 
ferentiated from other scourges. The Latin name 
variola, like the English pox, was applied indiscrimi- 
nately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc. Gonor- 
rhea was also common. The spread of these diseases 
was assisted by many causes besides the prevalent 
moral looseness ; by lack of cleanliness in public baths, 
for example. 



PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS 



513 



Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. 
Suffice it to say that whatever now torments poor mor- 
tals, from tooth-ache to cold in the head, and from 
rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our ancestors in 
aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, 
the evils of which were so little understood that it was 
actually prescribed for many disorders of which it is 
a certain irritant. Add to this the lack of sanitary 
measures, not only of disinfection but of common 
cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satis- 
factorily accounted for. 

If even now medicine as a science and an art seems Medicine 
backward compared with surgery, it has nevertheless 
made considerable advances since it began to be em- 
pirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely dog- 
matic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was 
the nature of the human body and the effect of this or 
that drug on it, they asked Aristotle, or Hippocrates, 
or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries, and they 
were bitter, w^ere between the Greek and the Arabian 
schools. Galenism finally triumphed just before the 
beginnings of experiment and research were made. 
The greatest name in the first half of the century was 
that of Theophrastus Paracelsus, as arrant a quack 
as ever lived, but one who did something to break up 
the strangle-hold of tradition. He worked out his 
system a priori from a fantastic postulate of the 
parallelism between man and the universe, the micro- 
cosm and the maci'ocosm. He held that the Bible gave 
valuable prescriptions, as in the treatment of wounds 
by oil and wine. 

Under the leadership of Ambroise Pare surgery im- Surgery 
proved rather more than medicine. Without anaes- i^{1\q 
thetics, indeed, operations were difficult, but a good 
deal was accomplished. Pare first made amputation 
on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature for 



c. 1550 



Paracelsus, 
1493-1541 



514 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 



large arteries that effectively controlled liemorrhage. 
This barber's apprentice, who despised the schools 
and wrote in the vernacular, made other important im- 
provements in the surgeon's technique. It is note- 
worthy that each discovery was treated as a trade 
secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practi- 
tioners and not given freely to the good of mankind. 

In obstetrics Pare also made discoveries that need 
not be detailed here. Until his time it was almost uni- 
versal for women to be attended in childbirth only by 
midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was the 
prejudice on this point that women were kno^vn to die 
of abdominal tumors rather than allow male physi- 
cians to examine them. The admission of men to the 
profession of midwife marked a considerable improve- 
ment in method. 

Lunacy The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor pa- 

tients were whipped or otherwise tormented for allud- 
ing to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors 
found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and 
made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the in- 
sane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's 
plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem 
tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the ground- 
lings before whom the plays were first produced. 

Hospitals As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals 

at Florence. He tells how beautiful they were, how 
clean and well served by honorable matrons tending 
the poor freely all day without making known their 
names and at night returning home. Such institu- 
tions were the glor^'' of Italy, for they were sadly to 
seek in other lands. When they were finally estab- 
lished elsewhere, they were too often left to the care 
of ignorant and evil menials. The stories one may 
read of the IIotel-Dieu, at Paris, are fairly hair-rais- 
ing. 



CHAPTER XI 
THE CAPITALISTIC KEVOLUTION 

§ 1. The Rise of the Power of Money 
Parallel with the Reformation ^vas taking place an Reforma- 

-, .. -, T , . tion and 

economic revolution even deeper and more enduring economic 
in its consequences. Both Reformation and Revolu- revolution 
tion were manifestations of the individualistic spirit 
of the age ; the substitution, in the latter case, of pri- 
vate enterprise and competition for common effort as 
a method of producing wealth and of distributing it. 
Both were prepared for long before they actually up- 
set the existing order; both have taken several cen- 
turies to unfold their full consequences, and in each 
the truly decisive steps were taken in the sixteenth 
century. 

It is doubtless incorrect to see either in the Refor- 
mation or in the economic revolution a direct and 
simple cause of the other. They interacted and to a 
certain extent joined forces; but to a greater degree 
each sought to use the other, and each has at times been 
credited, or blamed, with the results of the other's 
operations. Contemporaries noticed the effects, 
mostly the bad effects, of the rise of capitalism, and 
often mistakenly attributed them to the Reformation; 
and the new kings of commerce were only too ready 
to hide behind the mask of Protestantism while despoil- 
ing the church. Like other historical forces, while 
easily separable in thought, the two movements were 
usually inextricably interwoven in action. 

Capitalism supplanted gild-production because of its Rise of 
fitness as a social instrument for the production and capitalism 

515 



516 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 



Primary 
cause 
of the 
capitalistic 
revolution 



storing of wealth. In competition with capital the 
medieval communism succumbed in one line of busi- 
ness after another — in banking, in trade, in mining, 
in industry and finally in agriculture — because it was 
unable to produce the results that capital produced. 
By the vast reward that the newer system gave to indi- 
vidual enterprise, to technical improvement and to 
investment, capitalism proved the aptest tool for the 
creation and preservation of wealth ever devised. It 
is true that the manifold multiplication of riches in the 
last four centuries is due primarily to inventions for 
the exploitation of natural resources, but the capital- 
istic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these 
new discoveries and for laying up of their increment 
for ultimate social use. And this is an inestimable 
service to any society. Only a fairly rich people can 
afford the luxuries of beauty, knowledge, and power, 
that enhance the value of life and allow it to climb 
to ever greater heights. To balance this service, it 
must be taken into account that capitalism has lament- 
ably failed justly to distribute rewards. Its tendency 
is to intercept the greater part of the wealth it creates 
for the benefit of a single class, and thereby to rob the 
rest of the communitiy of their due dividend. 

So delicate is the adjustment of society that an ap- 
parently trivial new factor will often upset the whole 
equilibrium and produce the most incalculable results. 
Thus, the primary cause of the capitalistic revolution 
appears to have been a purely mechanical one, the in- 
crease in the production of the precious metals. 
Wealth could not be stored at all in the Middle Ages 
save in the form of specie; nor without it could large 
commerce be developed, nor large industry financed, 
nor was investment possible. Moreover the rise of 
prices consequent on the increase of the precious met- 
als gave a powerful stimulus to manufacture and a 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 517 

fillip to the merchant and to the entrepreneur such as 
they have rarely received before or since. It was, in 
short, the development of the power of money that gave 
rise to the money power. 

In the earlier Middle Ages there prevailed a ** nat- 
ural economy," or system in which payments were . ' 
made chiefly in the form of services and by barter; 
this gave place very gradually to our modern "money 
economy" in which gold and silver are both the normal 
standards of value and the sole instruments of ex- 
change. Already in the twelfth century money w^as 
being used in the towns of Western Europe ; not until 
the late fourteenth or fifteenth did it become a dom- 
inant factor in rural life. This change was not the 
great revolution itself, but was the indispensable pre- 
requisite of it, and in large part its direct cause. 

Gold and silver could now be hoarded in the form of ^^*'"5^' 

making 

money, and so the first step was taken in the formation kings 
of large fortunes, known to the ancient world, but al- 
most absent in the Middle Ages. The first great for- ^^_ 
tunes were made by kings, by nobles with large landed 
estates, and by officers in government service. Henry 
VII left a large fortune to his son. Some of the popes 
and some of the princes of Germany and Italy hoarded 
money even when they were paying interest on a debt, 
— a testimony to the increasing estimate of the value 
of hard cash. The chief nobles were scarcely behind 
the kings in accumulating treasure. Their vast rev- 
enues from land were much more like government im- 
posts than like rents. Thus Montmorency in France 
gave his daughter a dowry amounting to $420,000. 
The duke of Gandia in Spain owned estates peopled 
by 60,000 Moriscos and yielding a princely revenue. 
Vast ransoms were exacted in war, and fines, confisca- 
tion and pillage filled the cotTers of the lords. After 
the atrocious war against the Moriscos, the duke of 



518 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

Lerma sold their houses on his estates for 500,000 
ducats. 

Ofi&cials In the monarchies of Europe the only avenue to 

wealth at first open to private men was the govern- 
ment service. Offices, benefices, naval and military 
commands, were bought with the expectation, often 
justified, of making money out of them. The farmed 
revenues yielded immense profit to the collectors. No 
small fortunes were reaped by Empson and Dudley, 
the tools of Henry VII, but they were far surpassed 
by the hoards of Wolsey and of Cromwell. Such was 
the great fortune made in France by Semblangay, the 
son of a plain merchant of Tours, who turned the offices 
of treasurer and superintendent of finances to such 
good account that he bought himself large estates and 
baronies. Fortunes on a proportionately smaller 
scale were made by the servants of the German princes, 
as by John Schenitz, a minion of the Archbishop Elec- 
tor Albert of Mayence. So insecure was the tenure of 
riches accumulated in royal or princely service that 
most of the men who did so, including all those men- 
tioned in this paragraph, ended on the scaffold, save, 
indeed, Wolsey, who would have done so had he not 
died while aw^aiting trial. 

It is to be noted that, though land was the principal 
form of wealth in the Middle Ages, no great fortunes 
were made from it at the beginning of the capitalistic 
era, save by the titled holders of enormous domains. 
The small landlords suffered at the expense of the 
burghers in Germany, and not until these burghers 
turned to the country and bought up landed estates 
did agriculture become thoroughly profitable. 

Banking The intimate connection of government and capital- 

ism is demonstrated by the fact that, next to officials, 
government concessionaires and bankers were the first 
to make great fortunes. At this time banking was 



THE RISE OF THE POAVEK OF MONEY 519 

closely depoiident on public loans and was therefore 
the first great business to be established on the capi- 
talistic basis. The first "trust" was the money trust. 
Though banking had been well started in the Middle 
Ages, it was still in an imperfect state of development. 
Jews and goldsmiths made a considerable number of 
commercial loans but these loans were always regarded 
by the borrower as temjoorary expedients ; the habitual 
conduct of business on borrowed capital was unknown. 
But, just as the new output of the German mines was 
increasing the supply of precious metals, the greater 
costliness of war, due to the substitution of mercenaries 
and fire-arms for feudal levies equipped with bows 
and pikes, made the governments of Europe need 
money more than ever before. They made great loans 
at home and abroad, and it was the interest on these 
that expanded the banking business until it became an 
international power. Well before the sixteenth cen- 
tury men had made a fine art of receiving deposits, 
loaning capital and performing other financial opera- 
tions, but it was not until the late fifteenth century 
that the bankers reaped the full reward of their skill 
and of the new opportunities. The three balls in the 
arms of the Medici testify to the heights to which a 
profession, once humble, might raise its experts. In 
Italy the science of accounting, or of double-entry book- Scienceof 
keeping, originated; it was slowly adopted in other 
lands. The first English work on the subject is that 
by John Gouge in 1543, entitled: "A Profitable Trea- 
tyce called the Instrument or Boke to learn to know 
the good order of the keeping of the famouse recon- 
nynge, called in Latin, Dare et Habere, and, in Eng- 
lyshe, Debitor and Creditor." It was in Italy that 
modern technique of clearing bills was developed; the 
simple system by which balances are settled not by 
full payment of each debt in money, but by comparing 



accoimtmg 



520 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

the paper certificates of indebtedness. This immense 
saving, as developed by the Genoese, was soon extended 
from their own city to the whole of Northern Italy, so 
that the bankers would meet several times a year in 
the first international clearing-honse. From Genoa 
the same system was then applied to distant cities, 
wdth great profit, even more in security than in saving 
of capital. If bills payable at Antwerp were bought 
at Genoa, they w^re paid at Antwerp by selling bills 
on Lisbon, perhaps, and these in turn by selling ex- 
change on Genoa. These processes seem simple and 
are now universal, but how vastly they facilitated the 
development of banking and business when first dis- 
covered can hardly be over-estimated. 

From the improvement of exchange the Genoese soon 
proceeded to arbitrage, a transaction more profitable 
^ and more socially useful at that time when poor com- 
munications made the differences in prices between 
bills of exchange, bullion, coins, stocks and bonds in 
distant markets more considerable than they are now. 
^The Genoese bankers also invented the first substi- 
tutes for money in the form of circulating notes. In 
all this, and in other ways, they made enormous profits 
that soon induced others to copy them. 
Great firms Thougli the Italians invented modern banking they 
were eventually surpassed by the Germans, if not in 
technique at least in the size of the firms established. 
The largest Florentine bank in 1529 was that of Thomas 
Guadegni with a capital of 520,000 florins ($1,170,000). 
/ The capital of the house of Fugger at Augsburg, dis- 
tinct from the personal fortunes of its members, was 
in 1546, 4,700,000 gold gulden ($11,500,000) . The aver- 
age annual profits of the Fuggers during the years 
1511-27 were 54.5 per cent. ; from 1534-6, 2.2 per cent. ; 
from 1540-46, 19 per cent.; from 1547-53, 5.6 per cent. 
Another Augsburg firm, the Welsers, averaged 9 per 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 521 

cent, for the fifteen years 1502-17. Dividends were not 
declared annually, but a general casting up of accounts 
was made every few years and a new balance struck, 
each partner withdrawing as much as he wished, or 
leaving it to be credited to his account as new capital. 

Though the Fuggers and other firms soon went into Risks of 
large business of all sorts, they remained primarily ''^"'''"^ 
bankers. As such they enjoyed boundless credit with 
the public from Avhom they received deposits at regular 
interest. The proportion of these deposits to the cap- .--^ 
ital continually rose. This general tendency, together 
with the habit of changing the amount of capital every 
few years, is evident from the following table of the 
liabilities of the Fuggers in gold gulden at several 
different periods : 

Year Capital Deposits 

1527 2,000,000 290,000 

1536 1,500,000 900,000 

1546 4,700,000 1,300,000 

1563 2,000,000 3,100,000 

1577 1,300,000 4,000,000 

A smaller Augsburg firm, the Haugs, had in 1560, a 
capital of 140,000 florins and deposits of 648,000. As 
all these deposits were subject to be withdra^vn at 
sight, and as the firms usually kept a very small re- 
serve of specie, it would seem that banking was sub- 
ject to great risks. The unsoundness of the method 
was counterbalanced by the fact that most of the de- 
posits were made by members of the banker's family, 
or by friends, who harbored a strong sentiment against 
embarrassing the bank by withdrawing at inconvenient 
seasons. Doubtless the almost uniformly profitable 
career of most firms for many years concealed many 
dangers. 
The crash came finally as the result of the bankruptcy 



522 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

Bankruptcy of the Spanish and French governments. Spain's^ 
and Spain, i"cp"diation 01 her debt was partial, taking the form of 
1557 consolidation and conversion ; France, however, simply 

stopped all payments of interest and amortization. 
Many banks throughout Europe failed, and drew down 
with them their creditors. The years 1557-64 saw the 
first of these characteristically modern phenomena, 
international financial crises. There were hard times 
everywhere. Other states followed the example of 
the French and Spanish governments, England consti- 
tuting the fortunate exception. Recovery followed at 
length, however, and speculation boomed ; but a second 
1575 Spanish state bankruptcy brought on another crisis, 

and there was a third, following the defeat of the 
Armada. The failure of many of the great private 
companies was followed by the institution of state 
banks. The first to be erected w^as the Banco di 
1587 / Rialto in Venice. 

/ The banks were the agencies for the spread of the 
capitalistic system to other fields. The great firms 
either bought up, or obtained as concessions from some 
, government, the natural resources requisite for the 
production of wealth. One of the very first things 
Mining seized by them were the mines. Indeed, the profitable 
exploitation of the German mines especially dates from 
their acquisition by the Fuggers and other bankers 
late in the fifteenth century. Partly by the develop- 
ment of new methods of refining ore, but chiefly by 
driving large numbers of laborers to their maximum 
effort, the new mine-owners increased the production 
of metal almost at a bound, and thereby poured untold 
wealth into their own coffers. The total value of met- 
als produced in Germany in 1525 amounted to $4,800,- 
000 per annum, and employed over 100,000 men. Until 
1545 the German production of silver was greater 
than the American, and copper was almost as valuable 



THE RISP] OF TPIE POWER OF MONEY 523 

a product. Notwithstanding its increased production, 
its value doubled between 1527 and 1557. The shares 
in these great companies were, like the ''Fugger let- 
ters," or certificates of interest-bearing deposits in 
banks, assignable and were actively traded in on vari- 
ous bourses. Each share was a certificate of partner- 
ship which then carried with it unlimited liability for 
the debts of the company. One of the favorite specu- 
lative issues was found in the shares of the Mansfeld """ 
Copper Co., established in 1524 with a capital of 70,000 
gulden, which was increased to 120,000 gulden in 1528. 

"WTiereas, in banking and in mining, capital had al- Commerce 
most created the opportunities for its employment, in 
commerce it partly supplanted the older system and 
partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages 
domestic, and to some extent international, commerce 
was carried on by fairs adapted to bring producer and 
consumer together and hence reduce the functions of 
middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the 
annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart 
at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in 
Lyons, Antwerp, and many other cities. Only in the 
larger towns was a market perpetually open. Foreign 
commerce was also carried on by companies formed 
on the analogy of the medieval gilds. 

New conditions called for fresh means of meeting 
them. The great change in sea-borne trade effected by 
the discover}^ of the new routes to India and America, 
was not so much in the quantity of goods carried as in 
the paths by w^hich they traveled. The commerce of 
the two inland seas, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, 
relatively declined, while that of the Atlantic seaboard 
grew by leaps and bounds. New and large companies 
came into existence, formed on the joint-stock principle. 
Over them the various governments exercised a large 
control, giving them a semi-political character. 



524 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

Portugal As Portugal was the first to tap the Avealth of the 

gorgeous East, into her lap fell the stream of gold 
from that quarter. The secret of her windfall was 
the small bulk and enormous value of her cargoes. 
From Malabar she fetched pepper and ginger, from 
Ceylon cinnamon and pearls, from Bengal opium, the 
only known conqueror of pain, and with it frankincense 
and indigo. Borneo supplied camphor, Amboyna nut- 
megs and mace, and two small islands, Temote and 
Tidor, offered cloves. These products sold for forty 
times as much in London or in Antwerp as they cost 
in the Orient. No wonder that wealth came in a gale 
of perfume to Lisbon. The cost of the ship and of 
ythe voyage, averaging two years from departure to 
return, was $20,000, and any ship might bring back 
a cargo worth $750,000. But the risks were great. 
Of the 104 ships that sailed from 1497-1506 only 72 
returned. In the following century of about 800 Por- 
tuguese vessels engaged in the India trade nearly one- 
eighth were lost. Even the risk of loss in sailing from 
Lisbon to the ports of northern Europe was appre- 
ciable. The king of Portugal insured ships on a voy- 
age from Lisbon to Antwerp for a premium of six per 
cent. 

Spain Spain found the path towards the setting sun as 

golden as Portugal had found the reflection of his ris- 
ing beams. At her height she had a thousand mer- 
chant galleons. The chief imports were the precious 
'^metals, but they were not the only ones. Cochineal, 
selling at $370 a hundredweight in London, surpassed 
in value any spice from Celebes. Dye-wood, ebony, 
some drugs, nuts and a few other articles richly re- 
paid importation. There was also a very considerable 
export trade. Cadiz and Seville sent to the Indies an- 
nually 2,240,000 gallons of wine, with quantities of 
X oil, clothes and other necessities. Many ships, not 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 525 

only Spanish but Portuguese and English, were 
weighted with human flesh from Africa as heavily as 
Christian with his black load of sin, and in the case of 
Portugal, at least, the load almost sent its bearer to 
the City of Destruction. 

But Spanish keels made other wakes than westward. 
To Flanders oil and wool were sent to be exchanged 
for manufactured wares, tapestries and books. Italy 
asked hides and dyes in return for her brocades, pearls 
and linen. The undoubtedly great extent of Spanish 
commerce even in places where it had no monopoly, is 
all the more remarkable in that it was at the first 
burdened by what in the end choked it, government 
regulation. Cadiz had the best harbor, but Seville was —- 
favored by the king; even ships allowed to unload at 
Cadiz could do so only on condition that their cargoes 
be transported directly to Seville. A particularly 
crushing tax was the alcabala, or_10 ^er cent, impost 
on all sales. Other iniporFcIuties, royalties on metals, 
excise on food, monopolies, and petty regulations finally 
handicapped Spain 's merchants so effectually that they 
fell behind those of other countries in the race for su- 
premacy. 

As the mariners of the Iberian peninsula drooped France 
under the shackles of unwise laws, hardy sailors sprang 
into their places. Neither of the other Latin nations, 
however, was able to do so. The once proud suprem- 
acy of Venice and of Genoa was gone ; the former sank 
as Lisbon rose and the latter, who held her own at 
least as a money market until 1540, was about that 
time surpassed, though she was never wholly super- 
seded, by Antwerp. Italy exported wheat, flax, woad 
and other products, but chiefly by land routes or in 
foreign keels. Nor was France able to take any great 
part in maritime trade. Content with the freight 
brought her by other nations, she sent out few expedi- 



526 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

tions, and those few, like that of James Cartier, had 
no present result either in commerce or in colonies. 
Her greatest mart was Lyons, the fairs there being 
carefully fostered by the kings and being naturally 
favored by the growth of manufacture, while the mari- 
time harbors either declined or at least gained noth- 
ing. For a few years La Rochelle battened on religious 
piracy, but that was all. 
Germany In no country is the struggle for existence between 

the medieval and the modern commercial methods 
plainer than in Germany. The trade of the Hanse 
towns failed to grow, partly for the reason that their 
merchants had not command of the fluid wealth that 
raised to pre-eminence the southern cities. There 
were, indeed, other causes for the decline of the Han- 
seatic Baltic trade. The discovery of new routes, espe- 
cially the opening of Archangel on the White Sea, 
short-circuited the current that had previously flowed 
through the Kattegat and the Skager Rak. Moreover, 
the development of both wheat-growing and of com- 
merce in the Netherlands and in England proved dis- 
astrous to the Hanse. The shores of the Baltic had 
at one time been the granary of Europe, but they suf- 
fered somewhat by the greater yield of the more in- 
tensive agriculture introduced at that time elsewhere. 
Even then their export continued to be considerable, 
though diverted from the northern to the southern 
ports of Europe. In 1563, for example, 6630 loads 
of grain were exported from Konigsberg, and in 1573 
7730 loads. 

The Hanse towns lost their English trade in com- 
petition with the new companies there formed. A 
bitter diplomatic struggle was carried on by Henry 
VIII. The privileges to the Germans of the Steel- 
yard confirmed and extended by him were abridged 
by his son, partly restored by Mary and again taken 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 527 

away by Elizabeth. The emperor, in agreement with 
the cities' senates, started retaliatory measures against 
English merchants, endeavoring to assure the Hanse 
towns that they should at least "continue the ancient 
concord of their dear native country and the good 
Dutches that now presently inhabit it. ' " He therefore 
ordered English merchants banished, against which 
Elizabeth protested. 

While the North of Germany was suffering from its 
failure to adapt itself to new conditions, a power was 
rising in the South capable of levying tribute not 
only from the whole Empire but from the habitable 
earth. Among the merchant princes who, in Augs- 
burg, in Nuremberg, in Strassburg, placed on their 
own brows the golden crown of riches, the Fuggers 
were both typical and supreme. James Fugger ''the james 
Rich," springing from a family already opulent, was f^l^^q?'; 
one of those geniuses of finance that turn everything 
touched into gold. He carried on a large banking busi- 
ness, he loaned money to emperors and princes, he 
bought up mines and fitted out fleets, he re-organized 
great industries, he speculated in politics and religion. 
For the princes of the empire ho farmed taxes ; for the 
pope he sold indulgences at a 33 1/3 per cent, commis- 
sion, and collected annates and other dues. In Hun- 
gary, in Spain, in Italy, in the New World, his agents 
were delving for money and skilfully diverting it into 
his coffers. Pie was also a pillar of the church and a 
philanthropist, founding a library at Augsl)urg and 
building model tenements for poor workers. He be- ^^ 
came the incarnation of a new Great Power, that of 
international finance. A contemporary chronicler 
says: ** emperors, kings, princes and governors have 
sent ambassage unto him; the pope hath greeted him 
as his beloved son and hath embraced him; cardinals 
have risen before him. ... He hath become the glory 



528 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 



of the whole German land." His sons, Raymond, An- 
thony and Jerome, were raised by Charles V to the rank 
and privileges of counts, bannerets and barons. 

Throughout the centuiy corporations became less 
and less family partnerships and more and more im- 
personal or ''soulless." They were semi-public, semi- 
private affairs, resting on special charters and actively 
promoted, not only in Germany but in England and 
other countries, by the emperor, king, or territorial 
prince. On the other hand the capital Avas largely sub- 
scribed by private business men and the direction of 
the companies' affairs was left in their hands. Lia- 
bility was unlimited. 

Monopolies In their methods many of the sixteenth century cor- 
porations were surprisingly ''modem." Monopolies, 
corners, trusts and agreements to keep up prices flour- 
ished, notwithstanding constant legislation against 
them, as that against secret schedules of prices passed 

1522-3 by the Diet of Nuremberg. Particularly noteworthy 
were the number of agreements to create a monopoly 
price in metals. Thus a ring of German mine-o\Aaiers 
was formed artificially to raise the price of silver, a 
measure defended publicly on the ground that it en- 
riched Germany at the expense of the foreigner. An- 
other example was the formation of a tinning company 
under the patronage of Duke George of Saxony. It 
proposed agreements with its Bohemian rivals to fix 
the price of tin, but these usually failed even after a 
monopoly of Bohemian tin had been granted by Ferdi- 
nand to Conrad Mayr of Augsburg. 

The immense difficulty of cornering any of the larger 
articles of commerce was not so well appreciated in the 
earlier time as it is now. Nothing is more instructive 
than the history of the mercury "trusts" of those 
years. When the competing companies owning mines 
at Idria in Carniola amalgamated for the purpose of 



1524 



1518 



1549 



Corners 



1523 



TiiE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 529 

oiihanciiig the price of quicksilver, the attempt broke 
down by reason of the Spanish mines. Accordingly, 
one Ambrose Hochstetter of Augsburg conceived the 1528 
ambitious project of cornering the whole supply of 
the world. As has happened so often since, the higher 
price brought forth a much larger quantity of the 
article than had been reckoned with, the so-called ' ' in- 
visible supply"; the corner broke down and Hochstet- 
ter failed with enormous liabilities of 800,000 gulden, 
and died in prison. The crash shook the financial 
world, but was nevertheless followed by still better 
planned and better financed efforts of the Fuggers 
to put the whole quicksilver product of the world into 
an international trust. These final attempts were more 
or less successful. Another ambitious scheme, which 
failed, was that of Conrad Rott of Augsburg to get 1570 flf. 
a monopoly of pepper. He agreed to buy six hundred 
tons of pepper from the king of Portugal one year 
and one thousand tons the next, at the rate of 680 
ducats the ton, but even this failed to give him the 
desired monopoly. 

Just as in our ovra memorj^ the trusts have aroused Regulation 
popular hatred and have brought down on their heads l^^^ ° 
many attempts, usually unsuccessful, of governments 
to deal with them, so at the beginning of the capitalistic 
era, intense unpopularity was the lot of the new com- 
mercial methods and their exponents. Monopolies 
were fiercely denounced in the contemporary German 
tracts and every Diet made some effort to deal with 
them. First of all the merchants had to meet not only 
the envy and prejudices of the old order, but the posi- , " 

tive teachings of the church. The prohibition of usury, '^ 
and the doctrine that every article had a just or nat- 
ural price, barred the road of the early entrejireneur. 
Aquinas believed that no one should be allowed to make 
more money than he needed and that profits on com- 



530 THE CAPITALISTIC EEVOLUTION 

merce should be scaled down to such a point that they 
would give only a reasonable return. This idea was 
shared by Catholic and Protestant alike in the first 
years of the Reformation ; it can be found in Geiler of 
Kaiserberg and in Luther. In the Reformer's influ- 

1520 ential tract, To the German Nobility, usury and ''Fug- 

gerei" are denounced as the greatest misfortunes of 
Germany. Ulrich von Hutten said that of the four 
classes of robbers, free-booting knights, lawyers, 
priests and merchants, the merchants were the worst. 
The imperial Diets reflected popular opinion faith- 
fully enough to try their best to bridle the great com- 

1512 panics. The Diet of Treves-Cologne asked that mon- 

opolies and artificial enhancement of the prices of 
spice, copper and woolen cloth be prohibited. To ef- 
fect this acts were passed intended to insure competi- 

1523 tion. This law against monopolies, however, was not 

vigorously enforced until the Imperial Treasurer cited 
before his tribunal many merchants of Augsburg ac- 
cused of violating it. The panic-stricken offenders 
feverishly hastened to make interest with the princes 
and city magistrates. But their main support was 
the emperor, who intervened energetically in their fa- 
vor. From this time the bankers and great merchants 
labored hard at each Diet to place the control of monop- 
olies in the hands of the monarch. In return for his 
constant support he was made a large sharer in the 
profits of the great houses. 

In the struggle with the Diets, at last the capitalists 
were thoroughly successful. The Imperial Council of 

1525 Regency passed an epoch-making ordinance, kept se- 

cret for fear of the people, expressly allowing mer- 
chants to sell at the highest prices they could get and 
recognizing certain monopolies said to be in the na- 
tional interest as against other countries, and justified 
for the wages they provided for labor. About this 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 531 

time, for some reason, the agitation gradually died 
down. It is probable that the religious controversy 
took the public's mind off economic questions and the 
Peasant's War, like all unsuccessful but dangerous 
risings of the poor, was followed by a strong reaction 
in favor of the conservative rich. Moreover, it is evi- 
dent that the currents of the time were too strong to be 
resisted by the feeble methods pro^Dosed by the reform- 
ers. When we remember that the chief practical meas- 
ure recommended by Luther was the total prohibition 
of trading in spices and other foreign wares that took 
money out of the country, it is easy to see that the 
regulation of a complex industry was beyond the scope 
of his ability. And little, if any, enlightenment came 
from other quarters. 

While the towns of southern Germany were becom- The Nether- 
ing the world's banking and industrial centers, the 
cities of the Netherlands became its chief staple ports. 
For generations Antwerp had had two fairs a year, 
but in 1484 it started a perpetual market, open to all 
merchants, even to foreigners, the whole year round, 
and in addition to this it increased its fairs to four. 
Later a new Merchants' Exchange or Bourse was built ^^^^ 
in which almost all the transactions now seen on our 
stock or produce exchanges took place. There was 
wild speculation, partly on borrowed money, espe- 
cially in pepper, the price of which furnished a sort 
of barometer of bourse feeling. Bets on prices and 
on events were made, and from this practice various 
forms of insurance took their rise. 

The discovery of the new world brought an era of Antwerp 
prosperity to Antwerp that doubtless put her at the 
head of all commercial cities until the Spanish sword 
cut her down. In 1560 there were commonly 2500 ships 
anchored in her harbor, as against 500 at Amsterdam, 
her chief rival and eventual heir. Of these not un- 



532 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

commonly as many as 500 sailed in one day, and, it is 
said, 12,000 carriages came in daily, 2000 with pas- 
sengers and 10,000 with wares. Even if these state- 
ments are considerable exaggerations, a reliable ac- 
count of the exports in the single year 1560 shows the 
real greatness of the town. The total imports in that 
, year amomited to 31,870,000 gulden ($17,848,000), di- 
vided as follows: Italian silks, satins and ornaments 
6,000,000 gulden; German dimities 1,200,000; German 
wines 3,000,000; Northern wheat 3,360,000; French 
wine 2,000,000; French dyes 600,000; French salt 360,- 
000; Spanish wool 1,250,000; Spanish wine 1,600,000; 
Portuguese spices 2,000,000; English wool 500,000; 
English cloth 10,000,000. The last named article in- 
dicates the decay of Flemish weaving due to English 
competition. For a time there had been war to the 
knife with English merchants, follomng the great 
commercial treaty popularly called the Main's Inter- 
1506 cursus. According to the theory then held that one 

ciar'olicy n^tion's loss was another's gain, this treaty was con- 
sidered a masterpiece of policy in England and the 
foundation of her commercial greatness. It and its 
1496 predecessor, the Magnus Intercursus, marked the new 

policy, characteristic of modern times, that made com- 
mercial advantages a chief object of diplomacy and 
of legislation. Protective tariffs were enacted, the 
export of gold and silver prohibited, and sumptuary 
laws passed to encourage domestic industries. The 
policy as to export varied throughout the century and 
according to the article. The value of ships was highly 
appreciated. Sir Walter Raleigh opined that com- 
mand of the sea meant command of the world's riches 
and ultimately of the world itself. Sir Humphrey Gil- 
bert drew up a report advocating the acquisition of 
colonies as means of providing markets for home prod- 
ucts. So little were the rights of the natives consid- 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 533 



ered that Sir Humphrey stated that the savages would 
be amply rewarded for all that could be taken from 
them by the inestimable gift of Christianity. 

As little regard was shown for the property of Cath- 
olics as for that of heathens. JNIerry England drew 
her dividends from slave-trading and from buccaneer- 
ing as well as from honest exchange of goods. There 
is something fascinating about the career of a man 
like Sir John Hawkins whose character was as infa- 
mous as his daring was serviceable. He early learned 
that ''negroes were very good merchandise in His- 
paniola and that they might easily be had upon the 
coast of Guinea," and so, financed by the British aris- 
tocracy and blessed by Protestant patriots, he char- 
tered the Jesus of Luheclc and went burning, steal- 
ing and body-snatching in West African villages, 
crowded his hold full of blacks and sold those of them 
who survived at $800 a head in the Indies. Quite 
fittingly he received as a crest ''a demi-Moor, proper, 
in chains." He then went prejdng on the Spanish gal- 
leons, and at one time swindled Philip out of $200,000 
by pretending to be a traitor and a renegade ; thus he 
rose from slaver to pirate and from pirate to admiral. 

So pious, patriotic and profitable a business as buc- 
caneering absorbed a greater portion of England's 
energies than did ordinary maritime commerce. A list 
of all ships engaged in foreign trade in 1572 shows 
that they amounted to an aggregate of only 51,000 tons 
burden, less than that of a single steamer of the largest 
size today. Tlie largest ship that could reach London 
was of 240 tons, but some twice as large anchored at 
other harbors. Throughout the century trade multi- 
])lied, that of London, which profited the most, ten- 
fold. If the customs' dues funiish an accurate barom- 
eter for the volume of trade, while London was increas- 
ing the other ports were falling behind not only rela- 



Buccaneer- 
ing 



English 
commerce 



534 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

tively but positively. In the years 1506-9 London 
yielded to the treasury $60,000 and other ports $75,000 ; 
in 1581-2 London paid $175,000 and other ports only 
$25,000. 

As she grew in size and wealth London, like Antwerp, 
felt the need of permanent fairs. From the continental 
city Sir Thomas Gresham, the English financial agent 
in the Netherlands, brought architect and materials 

1568 and erected the Eoyal Exchange on the north side of 

Cornhill in London, where the same institution stands 
today. Built by Gresham at his own expense, it was 
lined by a hundred small shops rented by him. As the 
new was rung in, the old passed away. The ancient 
restrictions on the fluidity of capital were almost 

1542 and broken down by the end of Elizabeth's reign. The 
statutes of bankruptcy, giving new and strong securi- 
ties to creditors, marked the advent to power of the 
commercial class. Capitalism took form in the char- 
^tering of large companies. The first of these, ''the 
mistery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for 
the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places 
1553 ^ unkno\\ai, ' ' commonly called the Russia Company, was 
a joint-stock corporation with 240 members, each with 
a share valued at $125. It traded principally with 
Russia, but, before the century was out, was followed 
,^ by the Levant Company, the East India Company, and 
others, for the exploitation of other regions. 

To northern Spain England sent coarse cloth, cot- 
tons, sheepskins, wheat, butter and cheese, and brought 
back wine, oranges, lemons and timber. To France 
went wax, tallow, butter, cheese, wheat, rye, ''Man- 
chester cloth," beans and biscuit in exchange for pitch, 
rosin, feathers, prunes and "gTeat ynnions that be xii 
or xiiii ynches aboute," iron and wine. To the Rus- 
sian Baltic ports, Riga, Reval and Narva went coarse 
cloth, "corrupt" {i.e., adulterated) wine, cony-skins, 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 535 

salt and brandy, and from the same came flax, hemp, 
pitch, tar, tallow, wax and furs. Salmon from Ire- 
land and other fish from Scotland and Denmark were 
paid for by "corrupt" wines. To the Italian ports 
of Leghorn, Barcelona, Civita Vecchia and Venice, and 
to the Balearic Isles went lead, fine cloth, hides, New- 
foundland fish and lime, and from them came oil, silk 
and fine porcelain. To Barbaiy went fine cloth, ord- 
nance and artillery, armor and timber for oars, though, 
as a memorandum of 1580 says, "if the Spaniards 
catch you trading with them, you shall die for it." 
Probably what they objected to most was the sale of 
arms to the infidel. From Barbary came sugar, salt- 
petre, dates, molasses and carpets. Andalusia de- 
manded fine cloth and cambric in return for mnes 
called "seckes," sweet oil, raisins, salt, cochineal, in- 
digo, sumac, silk and soap. Portugal took butter, 
cheese, fine cloth "light green or sad blue," lead, tin 
and hides in exchange for salt, oil, soap, cinnamon, 
cloves, nutmegs, pepper and all other Indian wares. 

While the English drove practically no trade with 
the East Indies, to the West Indies they sent directly ^ 
oil, looking-glasses, knives, shears, scissors, linen, and ^ 
wine which, to be salable, must be "singular good." 
From thence came gold, pearls "very orient and big 
withall," sugar and molasses. To Syria went colored 
cloth of the finest quality, and for it currants and sweet 
oil were taken. The establishment of an English factor 
in Turkey with the express purpose of furthering trade 1582 
with that country is an interesting landmark in com- 
mercial history. 

Even as late as the reign of Elizabeth England im- 
ported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manu- 
factures of a certain sort were called. A famous Gammer 
Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, the ^"^j'je'' 
whole household being turned upside down to look for c. 1559 



ture 



536 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

tlie one lost by Gammer Gurton. These articles, as 
well as knives, nails, pins, buttons, dolls, tennis-balls, 
tape, thread, glass, and laces, were imported from the 
Netherlands and Germany. From the same quarter 
came ''small wares for grocers," — by which may be 
meant cabbages, turnips and lettuce, — and also hops, 
copper and brass ware. 

Manufac- Having swept all before it in the domains of bank- 

ing, mining and trade, capitalism, flushed with victory, 
sought for new worlds to conquer and found them in 
manufacture. Here also a great struggle was neces- 
sary. Hitherto the opposition to the new companies 
had been mainly on the part of the consumer ; now the 
/ hostility of the laborer was aroused. The grapple of 
the two classes, in which the Avage-earner went do^vn, 
partly before the arquebus of the mercenary, partly 
under the lash and branding-iron of pitiless laws, will 
be described in the next section. Here it is not the 
strife of the classes, but of the two economic systems, 
that is considered. Capitalism won economically be- 
fore it imposed its yoke on the vanquished by the harsh 
means of soldier and police. It won, in the final anal- 
ysis, not because of the inherent power of concentrated 
wealth, though it used and abused this recklessly, but 
because, in the struggle for existence, it proved itself 
the form of life better fitted to survive in the condi- 
tions of modern society. It called forth technical im- 
provements, it stimulated individual effort, it put an 
immense premium on thrift and investment, it cheap- 
ened production by the application of initially expen- 
sive but ultimately repaying, apparatus, it effected 
enormous economies in wholesale production and dis- 
tribution. Before the new methods of business the 
old gilds stood as helpless, as unready, as bowmen in 
the face of cannon. 



THE EISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 537 

Each medieval ''craft" or *'mistery"^ was in tlie Gilds 
hands of a gild, all the members of which were theoret- 
ically equal. Each passed through the ranks of ap- 
prentice and other lower grades until he normally be- 
came a master-workman and as such entitled to a full 
and equal share in the management. The gild man- 
aged its property almost like that of an endowment 
in the hands of trustees; it supervised the whole life 
of each member, took care of him when sick, buried 
him when dead and pensioned his widow. In these 
rcsfjccts it was like some mutual benefit societies of 
our day. Almost inevitably in that age, it was under 
the x^rotection of a patron saint and discharged va- 
rious religious duties. It acted as a corporate whole 
in the government of the city and marched and acted 
as one on festive occasions. 

As typical of the organization of industry at the 
turning-point may be given the list of gilds at Ant- 
werp dra^^^l up by Albert Diirer: There were gold- ^^^O 
smiths, painters, stone-cutters, embroiderers, sculp- , 
tors, joiners, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, 
cloth-weavers, bakers, cobblers, ''and all sorts of arti- 
sans and many laborers and merchants of provisions." 
The list is fully as significant for what it omits as for 
what it includes. Be it noted that there was no gild 
of printers, for that art had grown up since the crafts 
had begun to decline, and, though in some places found 
as a gild, was usually a combination of a learned pro- 
fession and a capitalistic venture. Again, in this great 
banking and trading port, there is no mention of gilds 
of wholesale merchants (for the "merchants of provi- 
sions" were certainly not this) nor of bankers. These 
were two fully capitalized businesses. Finally, observe 
that there were many skilled and unskilled laborers 

1 From the Latin mini^tcrium, French metier, not connected with 
"mystery." 



538 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

not included in a special gild. Here we have the be- 
ginning of the proletariat. A century earlier there 
would have been no special class of laborers, a century 
later no gilds worth mentioning. 
y The gilds were handicapped by their o%vn petty regu- 
/ lations. Notwithstanding the fact that their high 
standards of craftsmanship produced an excellent 
grade of goods, they were over-regulated and hide- 
bound, averse to new methods. There was as great 
a contrast between their meticulous traditions and the 
freer paths of the new capitalism as there was between 
scholasticism and science. They could neither raise 
nor administer the funds needed for foreign commerce 
and for export industries. Presently new technical 
methods were adopted by the capitalists, a finer way 
of smelting ores, and a new way of making brass, in- 
vented by Peter von Hoffberg, that saved 50 per cent, 
of the fuel previously used. In the textile industries 
came first the spinning-wheel, then the stocking-frame. 
So in other manufactures, new machinery required 
novel organization. Significant was the growth of new 
towns. The old cities were often so gild-ridden that 
/ they decayed, while places like Manchester sprang up 
suddenly at the call of employment. The constant ef- 
fort of the gild had been to suppress competition and 
to organize a completely stationary society. In a dy- 
namic world that which refuses to change, perishes. 
So the gilds, while charging all their woes to the gov- 
ernment, really choked themselves to death in their 
own bands. 
Capitalistic There is perhaps some analogy between the progress 
production ^j capitalism in the sixteenth century and the process 
by which the trusts have come to dominate production 
in our own memory. The larger industries, and espe- 
cially those connected with export trade, were seized 
and reorganized first ; for a long time, indeed through- 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 539 

out the century, the gilds kept their hold on small, 
local industries. For a long time both systems went 
on side by side; the encroachment was steady, but 
gradual. The exact method of the change was two- 
fold. In the first place the constitution of the gild be- - 
came more oligarchical. The older members tended 
to restrict the administration more and more; they 
increased the number of apprentices by lengthening 
the years of apprenticeship and reduced the poorer 
members to the rank of journeymen who were expected 
to work, not as before for a limited term of years, but 
for life, as wage-earners. "When the journeymen re- 
belled, they were put down. The English Clothwork- 
ers' Court Book, for example, enacted the rule in 1538 
that journeymen who would not work on conditions 
imposed by the masters should be imprisoned for the 
first offence and whipped and branded for the second. 
Nevertheless, to some extent, the master's calling was 
kept open to the more enterprising and intelligent la- 
borers. It is this opportunit}^ to rise that has always — 
broken up the solidarity of the working class more than 
anything else. 

But a second transforming influence worked faster Great 
from without than did the internal decay of the gild, companies 
This was the extension of the commercial system to - 
manufacture. The gilds soon found themselves at 
the mercy of the great new companies that wanted 
wares in large quantities for export. Thus the com- 
mercial company came either to absorb or to dominate 
the industries that supplied it. An example of this 
is supplied by the Paris mercers, who, from being 
mainly dealers in foreign goods, gradually became em- 
ployers of the crafts. Similarly the London haber- 
dashers absorbed the crafts of the hatters and cappers. 
The middle man, who commanded the market, soon 
found the strategic value of liis position for controlling 



540 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

the supply of articles. Commercial capital rapidly be- 
came industrial. One by one the great gilds fell un- 
der the control of commercial companies. One of the 
last instances was the formation of the Stationers' 
Company by which the printers were reduced to the 
rank of an industry subordinate to that of booksellers. 

Legislation Finally Came the legislative attack on the gilds, that 

^^ ^^ ^ broke what little power they had left. There is now a 
tendency to minimise the result of legislation in this 
. '" field, but the impression that one gets by perusing the 
statutes not only of England but of Continental coun- 
tries is that, while perhaps the governments would not 
have admitted any hostility to the gilds as such, they 
were strongly opposed to many features of them, and 
were determined to change them in accordance with the 
interests of the now dominant class. The policy of 
- the moneyed men was not to destroy the crafts, but to 
exploit them; indeed they often found their old fran- 
chises extremely useful in arrogating to themselves the 
powers that had once belonged to the gild as a whole. 
The town governments were elected by the wealthy 
burghers; Parliaments soon came to side with them, 
and the monarch had already been bribed into an ally. 
To give specific examples of the new trend is easy. 

1544 "When the great tapestry manufacture of Brussels was 

reorganized on a basis very favorable to the capitalists, 
the law sanctioning this step spoke contemptuously 
of the mutual benefit and religious functions of the 

1515 gild ag << petty details." Brandenburg now regulated 

the terms on which entrance to a gild should be al- 
lowed instead of leaving the matter as of old to the 

1540 members themselves. The Polish nobility, jealous of 

/ the cities' monopoly of trade, demanded the total aboli- 

1503 ff. tion of the gilds. A series of measures in England 
weakened the power of the gilds; under Edward VI 

1547 their endowments for religious purposes were at- 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 541 

tacked, and this hurt them far more than would appear 
on the surface. The important Act Touching Weavers 1555 
both witnessed the unhappy condition of the misteries 
and, without seeming to do so, still further put them 
in the power of their masters. The workmen, it seems, 
had complained ''that the rich and wealthy clothiers 
oppress them" by building up factories, or workshops 
in which many looms w^ere installed, instead of keeping 
to the old commission or sweat-shop s}' stem, by which 
piece work was given out and done by each man at 
home. The gild-workmen preferred this method, be- 
cause their great rival was the newly developed pro- 
letariat, masses of men who could only be accommo- 
dated in large buildings. The act, under the guise of 
redressing the grievance, in reality confirmed the pow- 
ers of the capitalists, for, while forbidding the use of 
factories outside of cities, it allowed them within to^\Tis 
and in the four northern counties, thus fortifying the 
monopolists in those places where they were strong, 
and hitting their rivals elsewhere. Further legisla- ^^ 
tion, like the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, -"^sSs 
strengthened the hands of the masters at the expense 
of the journeymen. Such examples are only typical; 
similar laws were enacted throughout Europe. By act 
after act the employers were favored at the expense of 
the laborers. 

There remained agriculture, at that time by far the Agriculture 
largest and most important of all the means by which 
man wrings his sustenance from nature. Even now 
the greater part of the population in most civilized 
countries — and still more in semi-civilized — is rural, 
but four hundred years ago the proportion was much 
larger. England was a predominantly agricultural -^ 
countrv^ until the eighteenth century, — England, the 
most commercial and industrial of nations! Though 



542 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

the last field to be attacked by capital, agriculture was 
as thoroughly renovated in the sixteenth century by 
this irrigating force as the other manners of livelihood 
had been transformed before it. 

Medieval agriculture was carried on by peasants 
holding small amounts of land which Avould correspond 
to the small shops and slender capital of the handi- 
craftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or 
a manor, was made up of different kinds of land, — 
arable, commons for pasturing sheep and cattle, for- 
ests for gathering fire-wood and for herding swine and 
meadows for gromng hay. The arable land was di- 
vided into three so-called '^ fields," or sections, each 
field partitioned into smaller portions called in Eng- 
land ''shots," and these in turn were subdivided into 
acre strips. Each peasant possessed a certain num- 
ber of these tiny lots, generallj^ about thirty, ten in 
each field. Normally, one field would be left fallow 
each year in turn, one field would be sown with winter 
wheat or rye (the bread crop), and one field with bar- 
ley for beer and oats for feeding the horses and cattle. 
Into this system it was impossible to introduce indi- 
vidualism. Each man had to plow and sow when the 
village decided it should be done. And the commons 
and woodlands were free for all, with certain regula- 
tions.^ 
Medieval The art of farming was not quite primitive, but it 

farming ^lad changed less since the dawn of history than it has 

mctiiods 

changed since 1600. Instead of great steam-plows and 
all sorts of machinery for harrowing and harvesting, 
small plows were pulled by oxen, and hoes and rakes 
were plied by hand. Lime, marl and manure were 
used for fertilizing, but scantily. The cattle were 

1 For the substance of this paragraph, as well as for numerous sug- 
gestions on the rest of the chapter, I am indebted to Professor N. S. B. 
Gras, of Minneapolis. 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY 543 

small and thin, and after a hard winter were sometimes 
so weak that they had to be dragged out to pasture. 
Sheep were more profitable, and in the summer sea- 
son good returns were secured from chickens, geese, 
swine and bees. Diseases of cattle were rife and 
deadly. The principles of breeding were hardly un- 
derstood. Fitzherbert, who wrote on husbandr^^ in the 
early sixteenth century, along with some sensible ad- 
vice makes remarks, on the influence of the moon on 
horse-breeding, worthy of Hesiod. Indeed, the mat- 
ter was left almost to itself until a statute of Henry 
VIII provided that no stallions above two years old 
and under fifteen hands high be allowed to run loose 
on the commons, and no mares of less than thirteen 
hands, lest the breed of horses deteriorate. It was to 
meet the same situation that the habit of castrating 
horses arose and became common about 1580. 

The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture Capitalistic 
took two principal forms. In some countries, like Ger- ^ ^"^^^ 

many, it was the consequence of the change from nat "^ 

ural economy to money economy. The new commer-; 
cial men bought up the estates of the nobles and sub- 
jected them to a more intense cultivation, at the same 
time using all the resources of law and government to 
make them as lucrative as possible. 

But in two countries, England and Spain, and to indosures 
some small extent in others, a profitable opportunity 
for investment was found in sheep-farming on a large ^ 
scale. In England this manifested itself in ''in- 
closurcs," by which was primarily meant the fencing 
in for private use of the commons, but secondarily 
came to be applied to the conversion of arable land 
into pasture ^ and the substitution of large holdings 
for small. The cause of the movement was the demand 
for wool in cloth-weaving, largely for export trade. 

>- Although Bome of the inclosed land was tilled ; Bee below. 



/ 



544 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

Complaint Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the opera- 
iaclosures tions of this cconomic change. A cry went up that 
sheep were eating men, that England was being turned 
into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich, 
while the land needed for grain was abandoned and 
tenants forcibly ejected. The outcry became loudest 
about the years 1516-8, when a commission was ap- 
pointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It 
was found that in the past thirty years the amount 
of land in the eight counties most affected was 22,500 
acres. This was not all for grazing; in Yorkshire it 
was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, 
in the south for pasture. 

The acreage would seem extremely small to account 
for the complaint it excited. Doubtless it was only 
the chief and most typical of the hardships caused to 
a certain class by the introduction of new methods. 
One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduc- 
tion of machinery in the nineteenth century, when 
the vast gain in wealth to the community as a whole, 
being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at the cost 
of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt 
themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always 
hard on a certain class and the sufferers quite naturally 
vociferate their woes without regard to the real causes 
of the change or to the larger interests of society. 

Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted 
throughout the century, in spite of legislative attempts 
to stop them. Indeed, they could hardly help continu- 
ing, when they w^ere so immensely profitable. Land 
that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for 
every three pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep 
multiplied accordingly. The law of 1534 spoke of some 
men o^vning as many as 24,000 sheep, and unwittingly 
gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, 



, THE RISE OP THE POWER OF MONEY 545 

namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. 
The law limited the number of sheep allowed to one 
man to 2000. The people arose and slaughtered sheep 
wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not 
unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the prole- 
tariat now and then seeks to destroy the wealth that 
accentuates their poverty. Then as always, the only 
causes for unw^elcome alterations of their manner of 
life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of 
a ring of men, or of the government. The deeper eco- 
nomic forces escaped detection, or at least, attention. 

During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 
2% per cent, of the total area of England had been 
inclosed. The counties most affected were the Mid- 
lands, in some of which the amount of land affected 
was 8 per cent, to 9 per cent, of the total area. But 
though the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger 
proportion, in the then thinly settled state of the realm, 
of the total arable land, — of this it was probably one- 
fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the im- 
proved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was 
under the plow. 

In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for com- Spain: the 
mercial purposes manifested itself in a slightly differ- '^^'^ 
ent form. There, not by the inclosure of commons,;^, 
but by the establishment of a monopolj^ by tlie Gas- i 
tilian "sheep-trusty" the Mesta, did a large corpora- 
tion come to prevail over the scattered and peasant 
agricultural interests. The Mesta, which existed from 
1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its power in the 
first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. When it took ^^^^ 
over from the government the appointment of the offi- 
cer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the 
Alcalde Entregador, it may be said to have won a 
decisive victory for capitalism. At that time it owned 



546 TPIE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

as many as seven million sheep, and exported wool to 
the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value of $560,000, 
per annum. 

Wheat Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by 

growing wool-growing, the capitalists next turned to arable land 
and by their transformation of it took the last step 
in the commercializing of life. Even now, in England, 
land is not regarded as quite the same kind of invest- 
ment as a factory or railroad ; there is still the vestige 
of a tradition that the tenant has customary privileges 
against the right of the owner of the land to exploit it 
for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint ghost of 
the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the 
profit of the landlord entirely secondary. The long- 
est step away from the medieval to the modern system 
was taken in the sixteenth century, and its outward 
and visible sign was the substitution of the leasehold 
// for the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the 
nature of a vested right or interest; the former was 
but a contract for a limited, often for a short, term, 
at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the rent 
raised, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine {i.e., 
fee) exacted for renewal of the lease. 

The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part 
consist of, the acquisition of the land by the new com- 
mercial class, resulting in increased productivity. 
New and better methods of tillage were introduced. 
The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were consoli- 
dated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used 
as the owner thought best. One year a field would be 
under a cereal crop ; the next year converted into pas- 
ture. This improved method, known as ''convertible 
husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser ex- 
tent on the Continent, was a big step in the direction 
of scientific agriculture. Regular rotation of crops 



THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY- 547 

was hardly a common practice before the eighteenth 
century, but there was something like it in places where 
hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals. Cap- 
italists in the Netherlands built dykes, drained marshes -^ 
and dug expensive canals. Elsewhere also swamps 
were drained and irrigation begun. But perhaps no 
single improvement in technique accounted for the 
greater yield of the land so much as the careful and 
watchful self-interest of the private owner, as against 
the previous semi-communistic carelessness. Several 
popular proverbs then gained currency in the sense 
that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like that put on 
by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in Eliza- 
])eth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as ^ 
an acre and a half of common, is borne out by the 
English statistics of the grain trade. From 1500 to 
153-i, while the process of inclosure was at its height, 
the export of corn more than doubled; it then dimin- 
ished until it almost ceased in 1563, after which it 
rapidly increased until 1600. During the whole cen- 
tury the population was growing, and it is therefore 
reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was 
considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500. 

It must, however, be admitted that the increase in Export of 
exports was in part caused by and in part symptomatic v^^^g" ^ '^'^ 
of a change in the policy of the government. When \ 
commerce became king he looked out for his owti in- \ 
terests first, and identified these interests with the 
dividends of small groups of his chief ministers. 
Trade was regulated, by tariff and bounty, no longer 
in the interests of the consumer but in those of the 
manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nine- 
teenth-century England have their counterpart in the 
Elizabethan policy of encouraging the export of grain ' 
that was needed at home. As soon as the land and the 
Parliament both fell into the hands of the new capi- 



548 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 



Money 

crowned 

king 



Revolution 



talistic landlords, they used the one to enhance the 
profits of the other. Nor Avas England alone in this. 
France favored the towns, that is the industrial cen- 
ters, by forcing the rural population to sell at very 
low rates, and by encouraging export of grain. Per- 
haps this same policy was most glaring of all in Sixtine 
Rome, where the Papal States were taxed, as the prov- 
inces of the Empire had been before, to keep bread 
cheap in the city. 

§ 2. The Rise of the Money Power 

In modern times, Money has been king. Perhaps 
at a certain period in the ancient Avorld wealth had as 
much power as it has now, but in the Middle Ages it 
was not so. Money was then ignored by the tenant or 
serf who paid his dues in feudal service or in kind; 
it was despised by the noble as the vulgar possession 
of Jews or of men without gentle breeding, and it was 
hated by the church as filthy lucre, the root of all evil 
and, together with sex, as one of the chief instruments 
of Satan. The *' religious" man would vow poverty 
as well as celibacy. 

But money now became too powerful to be neglected 
or despised, and too desirable to be hated. In the 
age of transition the medieval and modem concep- 
tions of riches are found side by side. When Holbein 
came to London the Hanse merchants there employed 
him to design a pageant for the coronation of Anne 
Boleyn. In their hall he painted two allegorical pic- 
tures. The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of 
AVealth. The choice of subjects was representative of 
the time of transition. 

The economic innovation sketched in the last few 

ipages was followed by a social readjustment sufficiently 

I violent and sufficiently rapid to merit the name of 

revolution. The wave struck different countries at 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 549 

different times, but when it did come in each, it came 
with a rash, chiefly in the twenties in Germany and 
Spain, in the thirties and forties in England, a little 
later, with the civil wars, in France. It submerged 
all classes but the bourgeoisie ; or, rather, it subjugated 
them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman tri- 
umph, the conquering car of Wealth. 

The one other power in the state that was visibly Bourgeoisie 
aggrandized at the expense of other classes, besides ^^onaj^jj 
the plutocracy, was that of the prince. This is some- — 
times spoken of as the result of a new political theory, 
an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther 
and Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. 
But in truth their theories were but an expression of 
the accomplished, or easily foreseen, fact; and this 
fact was due in largest measure to the need of the com- 
mercial class for stable and for strong government. 
Riches, which at the dawm of the twentieth century 
seemed, momentarily, to have assumed a cosmopolitan 
character, were then bound up closely with the power 
of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to 
secure concessions and markets, a mercantile society 
needed a strong executive, and this they could find 
only in the person of the prince. Luther says that 
kings are only God's gaolers and hangmen, high-born 
and splendid because the meanest of God's servants 
must be thus accoutred. It would be a little truer to 
say that they were the gaolers and hangmen hired by 
the bourgeoisie to over-awe the masses and that their 
quaint trappings and titles w^ere kept as an ornament 
to the gay world of snobbery. 

Together with the monarchy, the new masters of Andothe 
men developed other instruments, parliamentary gov- ^g^"^'^ 
ernment in some countries, a bureaucracy in others, 
and a mercenaiy army in nearl)^ all. At that time 
Tvas either invented or much quoted the saying tha,t 



550 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 



To break 
the nobility 



Plunder 
the church 



gold was one of the nerves of war. The expensive fire- 
arms that blew up the feudal castle were equally deadly 
when turned against the rioting peasants. 

Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way 
into the front rank, he was greatly aided by the frantic 
civil strife that broke out in both the older privileged 
orders. 'Never was better use made of the maxim, ** di- 
vide and conquer," than when the Reformation di- 
vided the church, and the civil wars, djmastic in Eng- 
land, feudal in Germany and nominally religious in 
France, broke the sword of the noble. When the earls 
and knights had finished cutting each others' throats 
there were hardly enough of them left to make a strong 
stand. Occasionally they tried to do so, as in the re- 
volt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls 
in England, and in the early stages of the rising of 
the Communeros in Spain. In every case they were 
defeated, and the work of the sword was completed by 
the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the blood- 
soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succumbed 
to the hired assassins of Catharine, the old nobles were 
disposed of and the power of their caste was broken. 
But their places were soon taken by new men. Some 
bought baronies and titles outright, others ripened 
more gradually to these honors in the warmth of the 
royal smile and on the sunny slopes of manors wrested 
from the monks. But the end finally attained was that 
the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the 
rich, the final badge of social deference to success in 
money-making. 

Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. 
The confiscations carried out in the name of religion 
redounded to the benefit of the newly rich. It is true 
that all the property taken did not fall into their hands ; 
some was kept by the prince, more was used to found 
or endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 551 

But the most and the best of the land was soon thro\\Ti 
to the eager grasp of traders and merchants. In Eng- 
land probably one-sixth of all the cultivated soil in 
the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a 
few years, into the hands of new men. Thus were 
created many of the *' county families" of England, 
and thus the new interest soon came to dominate Par- 
liament. Under Heniy VII the House of Lords, at 
one important session, mustered thirty spiritual and 
only eighteen temporal peers. In the reign of his son 
the temporal peers came to outnumber the spiritual, 
from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Com- 
mons became, what they remained until the nineteenth 
century, a plutocracy representing either landed or 
commercial wealtli. 

Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical '^ 
property took place throughout Germany, the cities 
generally leading. The process w^as slow, but certain, 
in Electoral Saxony, ITesse and the other Protestant 
territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in 
Denmark. But something the same methods were 
recommended even in Roman Catholic lands and in -^ 
Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the 
examples of the Reformers. Venice forbade gifts or ^^^^ 
legacies to church or cloisters. France, where confis- 1557 
cation was proposed, partiallj^ attained the same ends isie 
by subjecting the clergy to the power of the cro^\^l. 

Among the groups into which society naturally falls Bourgeoisie 
is that of the intellectual class, the body of profes- jnteUi- 
sional men, scientists, writers and teachers. This gentsia 
group, just as it came into a new prominence in the 
sixteenth century, at the same time became in part an 
annex and a servant to the money power. The high 
expense of education as compared with the ]\Iiddle 
Ages, the enormous fees then charged for graduat- 
ing in professional schools, the custom of buying 



552 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 



And subju- 
gates the 
proletariat 



Emancipa- 
tion of the 
serfs 



livings in the church and practices in law and medi- 
cine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made 
it nearly impossible for the sons of the poor to enter 
into the palace of learning. Moreover the patron- 
age of the wealthy, their assertion of a monopoly 
of good form and social prestige, seduced the profes- 
sional class that now ate from the merchant's hand, 
aped his manners, and served his interests. For four 
hundred years law, divinity, journalism, art, and edu- 
cation, have cut their coats, at least to some extent, 
in the fashion of the court of wealth. 

Last of all, there remained the only power that 
proved itself nearly a match for money, that of labor. 
Far outnumbering the capitalists, in every other way 
the workers were their inferiors, — in education, in or- 
ganization, in leadership and in material resources. 
One thing 'that made their struggle so hard was that 
those men of exceptional ability who might have been 
their leaders almost always made fortunes of their 
own and then turned their strength against their for- 
mer comrades. Labor also suffered terribly from 
quacks and ranters with counsels of folly or of mad- 
ness. 

The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of 
the characteristics of both medieval and modem times. 
The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was both com- 
munistic and religious ; the risings of Communeros and 
the Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; 
the several rebellions in England were partly religious. 
But a new element marked them all, the demand on 
the part of the workers for better wages and living 
conditions. The proletariat of to^vn and mining dis- 
trict joined the German peasants in 1524; the revolt 
was in many respects like a gigantic general strike. 

Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, 
the emancipation of the serfs cannot be reckoned as 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 553 

an immediate economic gain to them. They were freed 
not because of the growth of any moral sentiment, much 
less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but 
because free labor was found more profitable than 
unfree. It is notable that serfs were emancipated 
first in those countries like Scotland w^here there had 
been no peasants' revolt; the inference is that they 
were held in bondage in other countries longer than 
it was profitable to do so for political reasons. The 
last serf was reclaimed in Scotland in 1365, but the 
serfs had not been entirely freed in England even in 
the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on 
rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of 
the serfs themselves. One hundred thousand peasants 
emigrated from Northern France to Burgundy at that 
time to exchange their free for a serv^ile state. How- 
ever, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs 
in the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, 
lost their last chains in the sixteenth century, most 
rapidly between the years 1515 and 1531. In Germany 
serfdom remained far beyond the end of the sixteenth 
century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited 
by the civil war of 1525. 

In place of the old serfdom under one master came Regulation 
a new and detailed regulation of labor by the govern- 
ment. This regulation was entirely from the point of 
view, and consequently all but entirely in the interests, 
of the propertied classes. The form was the old form 
of medieval paternalism, but the spirit was the new 
spirit of capitalistic gain. The endeavor of the gov- 
ernment to be fair to the laborer as well as to the em- 
ployer is very faint, but it is just perceptible in some 
laws. 

Most of the taxes and burdens of the state Avere 
loaded on the backs of the poor. Hours of labor 
were fixed at from 12 to 15 according to the season. 



554 THE CAPITALISTIC EEVOLUTION 

Eegulation of wages was not sporadic, but was a regu- 
lar part of the work of certain magistrates, in England 
of the justices of the peace. Parliament enforced with 
incredible severity the duty of the poor and able-bodied 
man to work. Sturdy idlers were arrested and drafted 
into the new proletariat needed by capital. When 
whipping, branding, and short terms of imprisonment, 
did not suffice to compel men to work, a law was passed 

^^^ to brand able-bodied vagrants on the chest with a " V, " 

and to assign them to some honest neighbor 'Ho have 
and to hold as a slave for the space of two years then 
next following." The master should "only give him 
bread and water and small drink and such refuse of 
meat as he should think meet to cause the said slave to 
work." If the slave still idled, or if he ran away and 
was caught again he was to be marked on the face with 
an ' ' S " and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally 
refractory he was to be sentenced as a felon. This 
terrible measure, intended partly to reduce lawless 
vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers, 
failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. 
Its re-enactment was vainly urged by Cecil upon Par- 
liament in 1559. As a substitute for it in this year the 
law was passed forbidding masters to receive any 
workman without a testimonial from his last employer; 
laborers were not allowed to stop work or change em- 
ployers without good cause, and conversely employers 
were forbidden to dismiss servants "unduly." 

The pro- jj^ Germany the features of the modern struggle be- 

tween owners and workers are plainest. In mining, 
especially, there developed a real proletariat, a class of 
laborers seeking employment wherever it was best paid 
and combining and striking for higher wages. To 
combat them were formed pools of employers to keep 
down wages and to blacklist agitators. Typical of 
these was the agreement made by Duke George of Sax- 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 555 

ony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, 1520 
not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking 
work, and not to hire any troublesome agitator once 
dismissed by any operator. 

It is extraordinary how rapidly many features of the 
modern proletariat developed. Take, for example, the 
housing problem. As this became acute some employ- 
ers built model tenements for their workers. Others 
started stores at which they could buy food and cloth- 
ing, and even paid them in part in goods instead of in 
money. Labor tended to become fluid, moving from 
one town to another and from one industry to another 
according to demand. Such a thing had been not un- 
known in the previous centuries; it was strongly op- 
posed by law in the sixteenth. The new risks run by 
workers were brought out when, for the first time in 
history, a great mining accident took place in 1515, a 
flood by which eighty-eight miners were dro^vned. 
Women began to be employed in factories and were 
cruelly exploited. IMost sickening of all, children were 
forced, as they still are in some places, to wear out 
their little lives in grinding toih-'^he lace-making in- 
dustry in Belgium, for example, fell entirely into the 
hands of children. Far from protesting against this 
outrage, the law actually sanctioned it by the provi- 
sion that no girl over twelve be allowed to make lace, 
lest the supply of maidservants be diminished.^' 

Strikes there were and rebellions of all sorts, every Strikes 
one of them beaten back by the forces of the govern- 
ment and of the capitalists combined. The kings of 
commerce were then, more than now, a timorous and 
violent race, for then they were conscious of being 
usuipers. When they saw a Miinzer or a Kett — the 
mad Hamlets of the people — mcp and mow and stage 
their deeds before the world, they became frantic with 
terror and could do nought but take subtle counsel to 



556 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

kill these heirs, or pretenders, to their realms. The 
great rebellions are all that history now pays much at- 
tention to, but in reality the warfare on the poor was 
ceaseless, a chronic disease of the body politic. Louis 
XI spared nothing, disfranchisement, expulsion, whole- 
sale execution, to beat down the lean and hungry con- 
spirators against the public order, whose raucous cries 
of misery he detested. With somewhat gentler, be- 
cause stronger, hand, his successors followed in his 
footsteps. But when needed the troops were there to 
support the rich. The great strike of printers at 
Lyons is one example of several in France. In the 
German mines there were occasional strikes, sternly 
suppressed by the princes acting in agreement. 
Degrada- There Can be no doubt that the economic develop- 

thepoor ments of the sixteenth century worked tremendous 
hardship to the poor. It was noted everywhere that 
whereas wine and meat were common articles in 1500, 
they had become luxuries by 1600. Some scholars 
have even argued from this a diminution of the wealth 
of Europe during the century. This, however, was not 
the case. The aggregate of capital, if we may 
judge from many other indications, notably increased 
throughout the century. But it became more and more 
concentrated in a few hands. 

The chief natural cause of the depression of the 
working class was the rise in prices. Wages have 
always shown themselves more sluggish in movement 
than commodities. While money wages, therefore, re- 
mained nearly stationary, real wages shrank through- 
out the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged 
to spend 55 per cent, of his wages merely on food. A 
whole day's labor would only buy him two and one 
half pounds of salt. Rents were low, because the 
houses were incredibly bad. At that time a year's 
rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to twenty 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 557 

clays labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The 
new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his mar- 
kets by substituting foreign articles like indigo and 
cochineal for domestic farm products. The commer- 
cialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to 
the peasant. Many were turned off their farms to 
make way for herds of sheep, and others w^ere hired 
on new and harder terms to pay in money for the land 
they had once held on customary and not too oppres- 
sive terms of service and dues. 

Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its 
fields of cloth of gold and its battles like knightly 
jousts, with its constant stream of adulation from ar- 
tists and authors, with the ostentation of the new 
wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and 
enjoying, an attentive ear can hear the low, uninter- 
rupted murmurs of the wretched, destined to burst 
forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into fero- 
cious clamors. Nor was there then much pity for the No pity 
poor. The charity and worship for ''apostolic pov- 
erty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that 
social kindness, so characteristic of our owti time that 
it is affected even by those who do not feel it, arisen. 
The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or art, re- 
garded the peasant as a diiferent race — "the ox with- 
out horns" they called him — to be cudgeled while he 
was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. 
Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence 
of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, ''I hate the 
vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were 
aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely 
remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better 
than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew Lang 
and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom 
Jesus loved. ''Rustica gens optima flens" smartly ob- 
served a canon of Zurich, while Luther blurted out. 



for the 
poor 



558 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

''accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and *'the 
gentle" Melanchthon ahnost sighed, ''the ass will 
have blows and the people luill be ruled by force." 

There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to 
the prevalent callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble 
peasant," wrote an obscure German, "before all crea- 
tures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be thy 
equal. ' ' The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, 
a German humanist who was, by exception, also hu- 
mane, denounce the blood-sucking of the peasants by 
their lords. Greatest of all. Sir Thomas More felt, not 
so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at 
their wrongs. The Utopia will always remain one of 
the world's noblest books because it w^as almost the 
first to feel and to face the social problem. 

Pauperism TMs became urgent with the large increase of pau- 
perism and vagrancy throughout the sixteenth century, 
the most distressing of the effects of the economic rev- 
olution. When life became too hard for the evicted 
tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the declasse 
journeyman of the town gild, he had little choice save 
to take to the road. Gangs of sturdy vagrants, led by 
and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered through 
Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth cen- 
tury that race of mendicants the GijDsies, made their 
debut. The word "rogue" was coined in England 
about 1550 to name the new class. The Book of Vaga- 

1510 bonds, written by Matthew Hiitlin of Pfortzheim, de- 

scribes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their 
tricks, and gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some 
of these beggars are said to be dangerous, threatening 
the wayfarer or householder who will not pay them; 
others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds 
and disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious 
garb, or drag chains to show that they had escaped 
from galleys, or have other plausible tales of woe and 



THE EISE OF THE MONEY POWER 559 

of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the alann- 
ing numbers of these men and women ; how many they 
really were it is hard to say. It has been estimated 
that in 1500 20 per cent, of the population of Hamburg 
and 15 per cent, of the population of Augsburg were 
paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter 
to a third of the population of London were paupers, 
and the country districts were just as bad. Certain 
parts of AVales were believed to have a third of their 
population in vagabondage. 

In the face of this appalling situation the medieval 
method of charity completely broke dowm. In fact, 
with its many begging friars, with its injunction of 
alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to God, and 
with its respect for voluntary poverty, the church 
rather aggravated than palliated the evil of mendi- 
cancy. The state had to step in to relieve the church. 

This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe State poor- 
edict was issued and repeatedly re-enacted against ^^ ^^ ' 
tramps ordering them to be whipped, have their heads 
shaved, and to be further punished wdth stocks. An 
enterprising group of humanists and lawyers de- 
manded that the government should take over the duty 
of poor-relief from the church. Accordingly at Lille 
a ''common chest" was started, the first civil chari- 
table bureau in the Netherlands. At Bruges a cloister 1512 
was secularized and tunied into a school for eight hun- 
dred poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of 
charity was started at Antwerp. 1521 

Under these circumstances the humanist Lewis Vives 
wrote his famous tract on the relief of the poor, in the January, 
form of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In 
this well thought out treatise he advocated the law that 
no one should eat who did not work, and urged that all 
able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to artisans — 
a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to 



560 THE CAPITALISTIC EEVOLUTION 

draft men into tlicir workshops ! Cases of people un- 
able to work should also be taken up, and they should 
be cared for by application of religious endo^vments 
by the government. Vives' claim to recognition lies 
even more in his spirit than in his definite program. 
For almost the first time in history he plainly said that 
poverty was a disgrace as well as a danger to the state 
and should be, not palliated, but extirpated. 

While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city 
1525 of Ypres (tragic name!) had already sought his ad- 

vice and acted upon it, as well as upon the example of 
earlier reforms in German cities, in promulgating an 
ordinance. The city government combined all religi- 
ous and philanthropic endowments into one fund and 
appointed a committee" to administer it, and to collect 
further gifts. These citizens were to visit the poor 
in their dwellings, to apply what relief was necessary, 
to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures and 
to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging 
and idleness. All children of the poor were sent to 
school or taught a trade. 

Though there were sporadic examples of municipal 
poor-relief in Germany prior to the Reformation, it 
was the religious movement that there first gave the 
cause its decisive impulse. In his Address to the Ger- 
man Nobility Luther had recommended that each city 
should take care of its own poor and suppress "the 
rascally trade of begging." During his absence at the 
Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps 
to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A 
common fund was started by the application of eccle- 
siastical endowments, from Avhich orphans were to be 
housed, students at school and university to be helped, 
poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money 
at four per cent. A severe law against begging was 
passed, Augsburg and Nuremberg followed the e:^- 



THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER 561 

ample of Wittenberg almost at once and other German 1522 
cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one joined 
the procession. 

For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of 
pauperism, though it did not originate in the Reforma- 
tion, was much more rapidly and thoroughly developed 
in Protestant lands. In these the power of the state 
and the economic revolution attained their maximum 
development, whereas the Roman church was inclined, 
or obligated, to stand by the medieval position. 
''Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract. Thus 
Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published 1530 
A Plea for the Right of the Poor to Beg. The Spanish 
monk, Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his Sacred Ecou- 1564 
omy of caring for the Poor, condemned the whole plan 
of state regulation and subvention as heretical. The 
Council of Trent, also, put itself on the medieval side, 
and demanded the restoration to the church of the di- 
rection of charity. 

But even in Catholic lands the new system made 1531 
headway. As the University of Paris approved the 
ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in Catholic Ger- 
many, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but 
informed by the modern spirit, grew up. 

In England the problem of pauperism became more 
acute than elsewhere. The drastic measures taken to 
force men to work failed to supply all needs. After 
municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and 
after the government had in vain tried to stimulate 
private munificence to co-operate with the church to 1572 
meet the growing need, the first compulsoiy Poor Rates — "^ 
were laid. Three or four years later came an act for 
setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These meas- 
ures failed of the success that met the continental 
method. Even compared to Scotland, England devel- 
oped a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some 



562 THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

authorities have asserted that by giving the poor a 
legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. 
1572 Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme 

example of the commercialism that made money but 
did not make men. 



CHAPTER XII 
MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

Were we reading the biographj^ of a wayward ge- 
nius, we should find the significance of the book neither 
in the account of his quarrels and of his sins nor in 
the calculation of his financial difficulties and successes, 
but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty 
and wisdom of the world. Something the same is true 
about the history of a race or of a period ; the political 
and economic events are but the outward framework; 
the intellectual achievement is both the most attractive 
and the most repaying object of our study. In this 
respect the sixteenth century was one of the most bril- 
liant; it produced w^orks of science that outstripped 
all its predecessors; it poured forth masterpieces of 
art and literature that are all but matchless. 

§ 1. BrBLic.Uj AND Classical. Scholarship Position of 

Bible in 

It is naturally impossible to give a full account of i6thcen- 
all the products of sixteenth centuiy genius. In so ^^^ 
vast a panorama only the mountain peaks can be 
pointed out. One of these peaks is assuredly the Bible. 
Never before nor since has that book been so popular; 
never has its study absorbed so large a part of the 
energies of men. It is true that the elucidation of 
the text w^as not proportional to the amount of labor 
spent on it. For the most part it was approached not ^ 
in a scientific but in a dogmatic spirit. Men did not 
road it historically and critically but to find their o^\ni 
dogmas in it. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid 
for both the textual and the higher criticism. 

663 



564 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

The Greek Tlie Greek text of the New Testament was first pub- 
lished by Erasmus in March, 1516. Revised, but not 
always improved, editions were brought out by him in 
1519, 1522 and 1527. For the first edition he had be- 
fore him ten manuscripts, all of them minuscules, the 
oldest of which, though he believed it might have come 
from the apostolic age, is assigned by modern criticism 
to the twelfth century. In the course of printing, some 
bad errors were introduced, and the last six verses of 
the Apocalypse, wanting in all the manuscripts, were 
supplied by an extremely faulty translation from the 
Latin. The results were such as might have been an- 
ticipated. Though the text has been vastly purified by 
modern critics, the edition of Erasmus was of great 
service and was thoroughly honest. He noted that the 
last verses of Mark were doubtful and that the passage 
on the adulteress (John vii, 53 to viii, 11) was lacking 
in the best authorities, and he omitted the text on the 
three heavenly witnesses (I John v, 7) as wanting in 
all his manuscripts. 

For this omission he was violently attacked. To 
support his position he asked his friend Bombasius to 
consult the Codex Vaticanus, and dared to assert that 
were a single manuscript found with the verse in 
Greek, he would include it in subsequent editions. 
Though there were at the time no codices with the 
verse in question — which was a Latin forgery of the 
fourth century, possibly due to Priscillian — one was 
promptly manufactured. Though Erasmus suspected 
the truth, that the verse had been interpolated from 
the Latin text, he added it in his third edition ''that 
no occasion for calumny be given." This one sample 
must serve to show how Erasmus's work was received. 
For every deviation from the Vulgate, Avhether in the 
Greek text or in the new Latin translation with which 
he accompanied it, he was ferociously assailed. His 



BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 565 

own anecdote of the old priest who, having the mis- 
print ''mumpsimus" for ' ' sumpsimus " in his missal, 
refused to correct the error when it was pointed out, 
is perfectly typical of the position of his critics. New 
truth must ever struggle hard against old prejudice. 

While Erasmus was working, a much more ambi- 
tious scheme for publishing the Scriptures was matur- 
ing under the direction of Cardinal Ximenez at Alcala —^ 
or, as the town was called in Latin, Complutum. The 
Complutensian Polyglot, as it was thence named, was 
published in six volumes, four devoted to the Old Test- 
ament, one to the New Testament, and one to a Hebrew 
lexicon and grammar. The New Testament volume 
has the earliest date, 1514, but was withheld from the 1 
public for several years after this. The manuscripts 
from which the Greek texts were taken are unknown, 
but they were better than those used by Erasmus. The 
later editors of the Greek text in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, Robert Estienne (Stephanus) and Theodore Beza, 
did little to castigate it, although one of the codices 
used by Beza, and now known by his name, is of great 
value. 

The Hebrew Massoretic text of the Old Testament "^brew 

text 

was printed by Gerson Ben Mosheli at Brescia in 1494, 
and far more elaborately in the first four volumes of 
the Complutensian Polj'glot. "With the Hebrew text 
the Spanish editors offered the Septuagint Greek, the 
Syriac, and the Vulgate, the Hebrew, Syriac and Greek 
having Latin translations. The manuscripts for the 
Hebrew were procured from Rome. A critical re- 
vision was undertaken by Sebastian Miinster and pub- 
lished with a new Latin version at Basle 1534-5. Later 
recensions do not call for special notice here. An in- 
complete text of the Syriac New Testament was pub- 
lished at Antwerp in 1569. 

The numerous new Latin translations made during 



566 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



Latin 
versions 



1530 



April 8, 
1546 



1582 



1592 



Biblical 
scholarship 



this period testify to the general discontent with the 
Vulgate. Not only humanists like Valla, Lefevre and 
Erasmus, but perfectly orthodox theologians like Pope 
Nicholas V, Cajetan and Sadoletus, saw that the com- 
mon version could be much improved. In the new 
Latin translation by Erasmus many of the errors of 
the Vulgate were corrected. Thus, in Matthew iii, 2, 
he offers ''resipiscite" or ''ad mentem redite" instead 
of ''poenitentiam agite." This, as well as his substi- 
tution of "sermo" for ''verbum" in John i, 1, was 
fiercely assailed. Indeed, when it was seen what use 
was made by the Protestants of the new Greek texts 
and of the new Latin versions, of which there were 
many, a strong reaction followed in favor of the tradi- 
tional text. Even by the editors of the Complutensian 
Polyglot the Vulgate was regarded with such favor 
that, being printed between the Hebrew and Greek, it 
was compared by them to Christ crucified between the 
two thieves. The Sorbonne condemned as * ' Lutheran ' ' 
the assertion that the Bible could not be properly un- 
derstood or expounded without knowledge of the orig- 
inal languages. In the decree of Trent the Vulgate 
was declared to be the authentic form of the Scrip- 
tures. The preface to the English Catholic version 
printed at Rheims defends the thesis, now generally 
held by Catholics, that the Latin text is superior in ac- 
curacy to the Greek, having been corrected by Jerome, 
preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council 
of Trent. In order to have this text in its utmost 
purity an official edition was issued. 

Modern critics, having far surpassed the results 
achieved by their predecessors, are inclined to under- 
estimate their debts to these pioneers in the field. The 
manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries, concordances, 
special lexicons, all that make an introduction to bib- 
lical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or 



BIBLICAL SCHOLAESHIP 567 

were supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The 
professors at Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, 
were unable to find a map of Palestine. The first He- 
brew concordance was printed, with many errors, at 
Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 
1546, at Basle. To find a parallel passage or illus- 
trative material or ancient comment on a given text, 
the critic then had to search through dusty tomes and 
manuscripts, instead of finding them accumulated for 
him in ready reference books. That all this has been 
done is the work of ten generations of scholars, among 
whom the pioneers of the Renaissance should not lack 
their due meed of honor. The early critics were ham- . 
pered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, 
with purely dogmatic interest, had developed a hope- 
less and fantastic exegesis, by which every text of 
Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the historical, al- 
legorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical 
(or didactic). 

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to Erasmus 
a more fruitful method. It is true that his main ob- 
ject was a moral one, the overthrow of superstition 
and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of 
Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or 
chiefly, to explain away as fables stories that would 
seem silly or obscene as history. In the New Testa- 
ment he sought the man Jesus and not the deified ^^' 
Christ. He preferred the New Testament, with its 
''simple, plain and gentle truth, without savor of su- 
perstition or cruelty" to the Old Testament. He dis- 
criminated nicely even among the books of the New 
Testament, considering the chief ones the gospels. Acts, 
the Pauline epistles (except Hebrews), I Peter and 
I John. He hinted that many did not consider the 
Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in 
thought but not in style ; he believed Hebrews to have 



568 LIAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

been written by Clement of Rome ; and he called James 
lacking in apostolic dignity. 
Luther By far the best biblical criticism of the century was 

the mature work of Martin Luther. It is a remark- 
able fact that a man whose doctrine of the binding au- 
thority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his 
disciples permission to interpret the text w^itli the least 
shade of independence, should himself have shown a 
freedom in the treatment of the inspired waiters un- 
cqualed in any Christian for the next three centuries. 
It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were 
mere matters of taste ; that he took what he liked and 
rejected what he disliked, and this is true to a certain 
extent. ''What treats well of Christ, that is Scripture, 
even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he averred, 
and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against 
Christ, we must urge Christ against the Bible." His 
wish to exclude the epistle of James from the canon, 
on the ground that its doctrine of justification contra- 
dicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and excited 
wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir 
Thomas More, but also from many Protestants, begin- 
ning with Bullinger. 

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of 
the Bible were usually far more than would be implied 
by a merely dogmatic interest. Together with the best 
scholarship of the age he had a strong intuitive feel- 
ing for style that guided him aright in many cases. In 
denying the Mosaic authorship of a part of the Penta- 
teuch, in asserting that Job and Jonah were fables, in 
finding that the books of Kings were more credible 
than Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Hosea, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes had received their 
final form from later editors, he but advanced theses 
now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther, 
Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply con- 



version 



BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 569 

firmed. Some modern scholars agree with his most 
daring opinion, that the epistle of James was written 
by ''some Jew who had heard of the Christians but 
not joined them." After Luther the voluminous 
works of the commentators are a dreary desert of arid 
dogmatism and fantastic pedantry. Carlstadt was 
perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the 
time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis 
slumbers in fifty volumes in deserved neglect. 

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of p^^™^" 
the Bible that of Luther stands first in every sense of 
the word. Long he had meditated on it before his en- 
forced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the leisure 
to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had 
much help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg 
professors, was a life-long labor. Only recently have 
the minutes of the meetings of these scholars come to 
light, and they testif}^ to the endless trouble taken by 
the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. 
He wrote no dialect, but a common, standard German 
which he believed to have been introduced by the Saxon 
chancery. But he also modelled his style not only on 
the few good German authors then extant, but on the 
speech of the market-place. From the mouths of the 
people he took the sweet, common words that he gave 
back to them again, "so that they may note that we are 
speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put 
into the German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, 
lofty eloquence, poetry. 

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the 
Bible. To make Moses ''so German that no one would 
know that he was a Jew" insured a noble style, but in- 
volved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. 
Thus the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite 
plainly, and of German May-festivals; and the pass- 
over is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there not even 



570 MAIN CITERENTS OF THOUGHT 

an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the 
translation of Micah iv, 8? — *'Und du Thurm Eder, 
eine Feste der Tochter Zion, es wird deine goldene 
Eose kommen/' Luther declared his intention of 
"simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the 
rest of Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of 
fact the greatest change that he actually made was the 
introduction of the word ** alone" after ''faith" in the 
passage (Eomans iii, 28) ''A man is justified by faith 
without works of the law." Luther never used the 
word "church" (Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it 
by "congregation" (Gemeinde). Following Erasmus 
he turned /^eravoetre (Matthcw iii, 2, 8) into "bessert 
euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" 
("do penance") as in the older German versions. 
Also, following the Erasmian text, he omitted the 
"comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7) ; this was first 
insinuated into the German Bible in 1575. 
English None of the other vernacular versions, not even the 

^ ® French translation of Lefevre and Olivetan can com- 

pare with the German save one, the English. How 
yWilliam Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed 
the work in 1535, has been told on another page. 
Many revisions followed : the Great Bible of 1539, the 
Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops' Bible of 1568. 
Then came the Catholic, or Douai version of 1582, the 
only one completely differing from the others, with its 
foundation on the Vulgate and its numerous barbar- 
isms: "parasceue" for "preparation," "feast of 
Azymes" for "feast of unleavened bread," "imposing 
of hands," "what to me and thee, woman" (John ii, 4), 
' * penance, " " chalice, " " host, " " against the spirituals 
of wickedness in the celestials" (Ephesians vi, 12), 
" supersubstantial bread" in the Lord's prayer, "he 
exinanited himself" (Philippians ii, 7). 
We are accustomed to speak of the Authorized Ver- 



BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 571 

sion of IGIO as if it were a new product of the literary 
genius of Shakespeare's age. In fact, it was a mere ) 
revision, and a rather light one, of previous work. Its 
rare perfection of forai is due to the labors of many 
men manipulating and polishing the same material. 
Like the Homeric poems, like the Greek gospels them- 
^selves probably, the greatest English classic is the 
product of the genius of a race and not of one man. 
Even from the veiy beginning it was such to some ex- 
tent. Tyndale could hardly have known Wyclif 's ver- 
sion, which was never printed and was rare in manu- 
script, but his use of certain words, such as ''mote," 
"beam," and "strait gate," also found in the earlier 
version, prove that he was already working in a lit- 
erary tradition, one generation handing down to an- 
other certain Scriptural phrases first heard in the 
mouths of the Lollards. 

Both Tyndale and Coverdale borrowed largely from 
the German interpreters, as was acknowledged on the 
title-page and in the prologue to the Bible of 1535. 
Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the marginal 
notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, 
"this is once bone of my bone," "they offered unto 
field-devils" (Luther, "Felt-teuffeln")', "Blessed is 
the room-maker, Gad" (Luther, "Raum-macher"). 
The English translators also followed the German in 
using "elder" frequently for "priest," "congrega- 
tion" for "church," and "love" for "charity." By 
counting every instance of this and similar renderings. 
Sir Thomas More claimed to have found one thousand 
errors in the New Testament alone. 

The astounding popularity of the Bible, chiefly but Popularity 
not only in Protestant countries, is witnessed by a °^^'^'® 
myriad voices. Probably in all Christian countries 
in every age it has been the most read book, but in the 
sixteenth century it added to an unecLualed reputation 



572 MAIN CUERENTS OF THOUGHT 

for infallibility the zest of a new discovery. Edward 
VI demanding: the Bible at his coronation, Elizabeth 
passionately kissing it at hers, were but types of the 
time. That joyous princess of the Eenaissance, Isa- 
bella d'Este, ordered a new translation of the Psalms 
for her oa\ti perusal. ^Fargaret of Navarre, in the In- 
troduction to her frivolous Heptameron, expresses the 
pious hope that all present have read the Scripture. 
Hundreds of editions of the German and English trans- 
lations were called for. The people, wrote an Eng- 
lishman in 1539, ''have now in every church and place, 
almost every man, the Bible and New Testament in 
their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and 
fantastical books of the Table Round . . . and such 
other whose impure filth and vaili fabulosity the light 
of God hath abolished there utterly." In Protestant 
lands it became almost a matter of good form to own 
the Bible, and reading it has been called, not ineptly, 
''the 02MS operatum of the Evangelicals." Even the 
Catholics bore witness to the demand, which they tried 
to check. While they admonished the laity that it was 
unnecessary'^ and dangerous to taste of this tree of 
knowledge, while they even curtailed the reading of 
the Scripture by the clergy, they were forced to suppl}^ 
vernacular versions of their o^^^l. 
Bibliolatry Along with unbounded popularity the Bible then en- 
joyed a much higher reputation for infallibility than 
it bears today. The one point on which all Protestant 
churches were agreed was the supremacy and suffi- 
ciency of Scripture. The Word, said Calvin, flowed 
from the very mouth of God himself; it was the sole 
foundation of faith and the one fountain of all wisdom. 
"What Christ says must be true whether I or any 
other man can understand it," preached Luther. 
"Scripture is fully to be believed," wrote an English 
theologian, "as a thing necessary to salvation, though 



BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 573 

the thing contained in Scripture pertain not merely to 
the faith, as that Aaron had a beard. ' ' The Swiss and 
the Anabaptists added their voices to this chorus of 
bibiiolatry. 

Since studies pass into character, it is natural to ^^^""* 

studia in 

find a marked effect from this turning loose of a new mores 
source of spiritual authority. That thousands were 
made privately better, wiser and happier from the 
reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that 
standards of morality were raised and ethical tastes 
purified thereby, is certain. But the same cause had 
several effects that were either morally indifferent or 
positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by contem- 
poraries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, 
as Luther complained, interpreted the Holy Book ac- 
cording to his own brain and crazy reason. The old 
saying that the Bible w^as the book of heretics, came 
true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that 
none but the ministers (i. e. themselves) had the right 
to interpret Scripture. It was in vain for the govern- 
ments to forbid, as the Scotch statute expressed it, 
''any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible"; dis- 
cordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some 
learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig- 
headed and intolerant. 

There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion 
to the amount of inerrancy attributed to it, became a 
stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, so- 
cial and even moral. It was quoted against Copeniicus 
as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism 
was regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, 
as a cause of vehement suspicion of atheism. Some 
texts buttressed the horrible and cruel superstition of 
witchcraft. The, examples of the wars of Israel and 
the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to sup- 
port the duty of intolerance. Social reformers, like 



1550 



674 MAIN CUERENTS OF THOUGHT 

Vives, in their struggle to abolish poverty, were con- 
fronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal verity, 
that the poor are always with us. Finally the great 
moral lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission 
of polygamy, was supported by biblical texts. 
The Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the 

clflssics 

classics. Most of the great Latin authors had been 
printed prior to 1500, the most important exception 
being the Annals of Tacitus, of which the editio prin- 
ceps was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, 
the following Greek works had been published, and in 
this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the 
Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theog- 
nis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the 
dates of the editiones principes of the other principal 
Greek writers : 



1502: 


Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus. 


1503: 


Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's Hellen 


1504: 


ICQi. 

Demosthenes. 


1509: 


Plutarch's Moralia. 


1513: 


Pindar, Plato. 


1516: 


Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pau 




sanias, Strabo. 


1517: 


Plutarch's Lives. 


1518: 


Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays. 


1525: 


Galen, Xenophon's complete works. 


1528: 


Epictetus. 


1530: 


Polybius. 


1532: 


Aristophanes, eleven plays. 


1533: 


Euclid, Ptolemy, 


1544: 


Josephus. 


1552: 


Aeschylus, seven plays. 


1558: 


Marcus Aurelius. 


1559: 


Diodorus. 


1565: 


Bion and Moschus. 


1572: 


Plutarch's complete works. 



ISTaturally the first editions werer not usually the best. 



CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 575 

The labor of successive generations has made the Scholarship 
text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not 
exclusively, in editing the fathers of the church, was 
done by Erasmus. But a really new school of histor- 
ical criticism was created by Joseph Justus Scaliger, J- J- Sca- 
the greatest of scholars. His editions of the Latin 15^^1609 
poets first laid down and applied sound rules of textual 
emendation, besides elucidating the authors with a --i/^'-'^^ 
wealth of learned comment. 

The editing of the texts was but a small portion of 
the labor that went to the cultivation of the classics. 
The foundations of our modem lexicons were laid in 
the great Thesaurus linguae Latinae of Robert Es- 
ticnne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in 
three volumes 1543) and the Thesaurus linguae Graecae 
by Henry Estienne the younger, published in five vol- 
umes in 1572. This latter is still used, the best edition 
being that in nine volumes 1829-63. 

So much of ancient learning has become a matter of 
course to the modern student that he does not always 
realize the amount of ground covered in the last four 
centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani: 
''The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient poets vainly November 
promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that 
its very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the 
greatest scholars then was ignorant of a site now vis- 
ited by every tourist in the Eternal City, how much 
must there not have been to learn in other respects'? 
Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and 
successors of Erasmus labored to supply the knowledge 
then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammars 
were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epi- 
graphy, on ancient religion, on chronology, on com- 
parative philology, on Roman law, laid deep and strong 
the foundations of the consummate scholarship of mod- 
ern times. 



576 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



Idolatry of 
ancients 



1573 



The classics were not only studied in the sixteenth 
century, they were loved, they were even worshipped. 
'* Every elegant study, every science worthy of the at- 
tention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there 
is of polite learning, ' ' wrote the French savant Muret, 
''is contained nowhere save in the literature of the 
Greeks." Joachim du Bellay wrote a cycle of son- 
nets on the antiquities of Rome, in the spirit : 



Value of 
classics in 
16th cen- 
tury 



Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome. 

''The Latin allureth me by its gracious dignity," 
wrote Montaigne, "and the writings of the Greeks not 
only fill and satisfy me, but transfix me with admira- 
tion. . . . What glory can compare with that of 
Homer?" Machiavelli tells how he dressed each eve- 
ning in his best attire to be worthy to converse with 
the spirits of the ancients, and how, while reading 
them, he forgot all the woes of life and the terror of 
death. Almost all learned works, and a great many 
not learned, were written in Latin. For those who 
could not read the classics for themselves translations 
were supplied. Perhaps the best of these were the 
Lives of Famous Men by Plutarch, first rendered into 
French by Amyot and thence into English by Sir 
Thomas North. 

Strong, buoyant, self-confident as was the spirit of 
the age, it bore plainly upon it the impress of its zeal- 
ous schooling in the lore of the ancients. In supplying 
the imperious need of cultured men for good literature 
the Romans and Greeks had, in the year 1500, but few 
rivals — save in Italy, hardly any. To an age that had 
much to learn they had much to teach ; to men as greedy 
for the things of the mind as they were for luxury and 
wealth the classics offered a new world as rich in spoils 
of wisdom and beauty as were the East Indies and 



CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 577 

Peru in spices and gold. The supreme value of the 
Greek and Latin books is that which they have in com- 
mon with all literature; they furnished, for the mass 
of reading men, the best and most copious supply of 
food for the intellectual and spiritual life. ''Books," 
says Erasmus, ''are both cheering and wholesome. In 
prosperity they steady one, in affliction console, do not 
vary with fortune and follow one through all dangers 
even to the grave. . . . What wealth or what scepters 
would I exchange for my tranquil reading?" "From 
my earliest childhood," Montaigne confides, "poetry 
has had the power to pierce me through and transport 
me. ' ' 

In the best sense of the word, books are popular phi- 
losophy. All cannot study the deepest problems of 
life or of science for themselves, but all can absorb the 
quintessence of thought in the pleasant and stimulat- 
ing form in which it is served up in the best literature. 
Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to 
cultivate a high and noble inward life. This, their su- 
preme value for the moulding of character, was appre- 
ciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink the 
•spirit of the classics," observes ]\Iontaigne, "rather 
than learn their precepts," and again, "the use to 
which I put my studies is a practical one — the forma- 
tion of character for the exigencies of life." 

This is the service by which the ancients have put Ancient 
the moderns in their debt. Another gift of distinct, masters 

• T J. 1 CI or literary 

though lesser value, was that ot literary style. fc»o gtyje 
close is the correspondence between expression and 
thought that it is no small advantage to any man or 
to any age to sit at the feet of those supreme masters 
of the art of saying things well, the Greeks. The dan- 
ger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with 
habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years 
in constructing sentences that might have been written 



578 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

by his master, who speaks of Jehovah as Jupiter and of 
Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who transmutes 
the world around him into a Roman empire with trib- 
unes and augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant 
that the English word '^pedant" was coined in the six- 
teenth century. 

What the classics had to teach directly was not only 
of less value than their indirect influence, but was often 
positively harmful. Those who, intoxicated with the 
pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by the 
moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, 
though into the opposite vices, as those who deified the 
letter of the Bible. Like the Bible the classics were, 
and are, to some extent obstacles to the march of sci- 
ence, and this not only because they take men's inter- 
est from the study of nature, but because most ancient 
philosophers from the time of Socrates spoke con- 
temptuously of natural experiment and discovery as 
things of little or no value to the soul. 

If for the finer spirits of the age a classical educa- 
tion furnished a noble instrument of culture, for all 
too many it w^as prized simply as a badge of supe- 
riority. Among a people that stands in awe of learn- 
ing — and this is more true of Europe than of America 
and was more true of the sixteenth than it is of the 
twentieth century — a classical education offers a man 
exceptional facilities for delicately impressing' infe- 
riors with their crudity. 
Vernaculars The period that marked high water in the estimation 
of the classics, also saw the turn of the tide. In all 
countries the vernacular crowded the classics ever 
backward from the field. The conscious cultivation of 
the modern tongues was marked by the publication of 
new dictionaries and by various works such as John 
Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to 
be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was 



HISTORY 579 

Joachim du Bellay's Defence et Illustration de la 
langue frangaise published in 1549 as part of a con- 
certed effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and 
prose to a level with the classics. This was done 
partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the charac- 
teristic words of the sixteenth century, *'patrie," was 
thus formally introduced. 

§ 2. History 

For the examination of the interests and temper of 
a given era, hardly any better gauge can be found than 
the historj'^ it produced. In the period under consid- 
eration there were two great schools, or currents, of 
historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Re- 
naissance, and church history, the child of the Ref- 
ormation. 

The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what Humanistic 
has just been said about the influence of the classics. ^^^^QJ■J 
Their supreme interest was style, generally Latin. To ography 
clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods, to deck 
it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a 
few antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, 
seemed to them the height of art. Their choice of 
matter was as characteristic as their manner, in that 
their interest was exclusively political and aristocratic. 
Save the doings of courts and camps, the political in- 
trigues of governments and the results of battles, to- 
gether with the virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw 
little in history. What the people thought, felt and 
suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of 
them have much interest in art, science or literature, 
or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man 
in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted 
the Book of Articles, came to write the history of his 
own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imi- 
tate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the 



580 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

i;eligious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the 
priests who thought the Neiv Testatment was written 
by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament 
back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few 
other passing references are all of the Reformation 
that comes into a bulky volume dealing with the reigns 
of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in political 
liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between 
tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not 
so plainly rooted in antique soil. 

The prevailing vice of the humanists — to see in the 
story of a people nothing but a political lesson — is car- 

Machiavelli ried to its extreme by Machiavelli. Writing with all 
the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered 
facts to'suit his thesis to the point of composing histor- 
ical romances. His Life of Castruccio is as fictitious 
and as didactic as Xenophon's Cyropaedia; his Com- 
mentary on Livy is as much a treatise on politics as is 
TJie Prince; the History of Florence is but slightly 
hampered by the events. 

Guicciar- If Guicciardini 's interest in politics is not less ex- 

^*"* elusive than that of his compatriot, he is vastly supe- 

rior as a historian to the older man in that, whereas 
Machiavelli deduced history a priori from theory, 
Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive 
method of deriving his theory from an accurate mas- 
tery of the facts. With superb analytical reasoning he 
presents his data, marshals them and draws from 
them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation 
that vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into 
account only low and selfish motives. Before idealists 
he stands helpless; he leaves the reader uncertain 
whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely 
astute politician. 

jovius The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the 

Florentines lies in the appeal that he made to the in- 



HISTORY 581 

terests of the general public. History had hitherto 
been written for the greater glory of a patron or at . 
most of a city ; Jovius saw that the most generous pa- 
tron of genius must henceforth be the average reader. 
It is true that he despised the public for whom he 
wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as the 
first great interviewer and reporter for the history of 
his own times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy 
by assuming an air of virtue not natural to him, he 
anticipated the modern journalist. 

So much more modern in point of view than his con- Po^y^ore 
temporaries was Polydore Vergil — whose English His- 
tory appeared in 1534 — that the generalizations about 
humanist historiography are only partially true of him. 
Though his description of land and people is perhaps 
modelled on Herodotus, it shows a genuine interest in 
the life of the common man, even of the poor. He 
noted the geography, climate and fauna of the island ; 
his eyes saw London Bridge with its rows of shops on 
either side, and they admired the parks full of game, 
the apple orchards, the fat hens and pheasants, the 
ploughs drawn by mixed teams of horses and oxen ; he 
even observed the silver salt-cellars, spoons and cups 
used by the poor, and their meals of meat. His de- 
scription of the people as brave, hospitable and very 
religious is as true now as it was then. With an anti- 
quary's interest in old manuscripts Vergil combined a 
philosopher's skepticism of old legends. This Italian, 
though his patron was Henry VIII, balanced English 
and French authorities and told the truth even in such 
delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of Arc. 
Political history was for him still the most important, 
although to one branch of it, constitutional history, he 
was totally blind. So were almost all Englishmen then, 
even Shakespeare, whose King John contains no allu- 
sion to Magna Charta. In his work On the Inventors 



582 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



French 
Memoirs 



of Things Vergil showed the depth of his insight into 
the importance in history of culture and ideas. While 
his treatment of such subjects as the origin of myths, 
man, marriage, religion, language, poetry, drama, mu- 
sic, sciences and laws is unequal to his purpose, the in- 
tention itself bears witness to a new and fruitful spirit. 

Neither France nor England nor Germany produced 
historians equal to those of Italian or of Scottish birth. 
France was the home of the memoir, personal, chatty, 
spicy and unphilosophic. Those of Blaise de Montluc 
are purely military, those of Brantome are mostly 
scandalous. Martin du Bellay tried to impart a higher 
tone to his reminiscences, while with Hotman a school 
of pamphleteers arose to yoke history with political 
theory. John Bodin attempted without much success 
the difficult task of writing a philosophy of history. 
His chief contribution was the theory of geography and 
climate as determinant influences. 

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as 
sources, in the popular English chronicles of Edward 
Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John Stow. Full of 
court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist, con- 
servative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the 
middle-class cockney as faithfully as does a certain 
type of newspaper and magazine today. 
Biographies The biography and autobiography were cultivated 
with considerable success. Jovius and Brantome both 
wrote series of lives of eminent men and women. 
Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are 
both few and brief, they are notable as among the most 
exquisite pen-portraits in literature. More ambitious 
and more notable were the Lives of the Best Painters, 
Sculptors and Architects by George Vasari, in which 
the whole interest was personal and practical, with no 
attempt to write a history or a philosophy of art. 
Even criticism was confined almost entirely to vari- 



English 
chronicles 



1550 



HISTORY 583 

ations of praise. In the realm of autobiography Ben- 
venuto Cellini attained to the non plus ultra of self- 
revelation. If he discloses the springs of a rare 
artistic genius, with equal naivete he lays bare a ruf- 
fianly character and a colossal egotism. 

One immense field of human thought and action had Church 
been all but totally ignored by the humanist historians '^^""^ 
— that of religion. To cultivate this field a new genre, 
church history, sprang into being, though the felt want 
was not then for a rational explanation of important 
and neglected phenomena, but for material which each 
side in the religious controversy might forge into weap- 
ons to use against the other. The natural result of 
so practical a purpose was that history was studied 
through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with 
strong tendency. In the most honest hands, such as 
those of Sleidan, the scale was unconsciously weighted 
on one side ; by more passionate or less honorable ad- 
vocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression 
of the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of 
the false on the other. 

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant 
narrowed history, their common detestation of all 
other religions than Christianity, as well as of all 
heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it 
still more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary 
preparation, ancient Judaism, was set apart as di- 
vinely revealed over against all other faiths and beliefs, 
wliich at best were "the beastly devices of the heathen" 
and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few 
were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ 
with Socrates, Plato and Seneca ; fewer still those who 
could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for 
truth is always called heresy." The names of Mar- 
cion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a 
passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The 



584 MAIN CUREENTS OF THOUGHT 

refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices 
would have been ludicrous had it not been pitiful. 

In large part this vicious interpretation of history 
was bequeathed to the Reformers by the Middle Ages. 
As Augustine set the City of God over against the city 
of destruction, so the Protestant historians regarded 
the human drama as a puppet show in which God and 
the devil pulled the strings. Institutions of which they 
disapproved, such as the papacy and monasticism, were 
thought to be adequately explained by the suggestion 
,^ of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses 

passed the truth do^\^l, like buckets of water at a fire, 
from its source in the Apostolic age to the time of the 
writer. 

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the 
study of church history did much good. A vast body 
of new sources were uncovered and ransacked. The 
appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely 
forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of 
truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one 
cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. 
The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an 
enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign 
growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, 
fairer judgment and deeper human interest. In these 
respects there was vast diiference between the indi- 
vidual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge 
deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating. 
Magdeburg Amoug the most industrious and the most biassed 
£59-74^^' ^^^^^^ certainly be numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus 
and his collaborators in producing the Magdeburg Cen- 
turies, a vast history of the church to the year 1300, 
which aimed at making Protestant polemic independ- 
ent of Catholic sources. Save for the accumulation of 
much material it deserves no praise. Its critical prin- 
ciples are worse than none, for its only criterion of 



HISTORY 585 

sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The latter 
are taken and the former left. Miracles are not 
doubted as such, but are divided into two classes, those 
tending to prove an accepted doctrine which are true, 
and those which support some papal institution which 
are branded as *' first-class lies." The correspondence 
between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not hav- 
ing been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the 
female Pope Joan is never doubted. The psychology 
of the authors is as bad as their criticism. All opposi- 
tion to the pope, especially that of the German Em- 
perors, is represented as caused by religion. 

However poor was the work of the authors of the Annalesoi 
Magdeburg Centuries, they were at least honest in 15^83-1607 
arraying their sources. This is more than can be said 
of Caesar Baronius, whose Annales Ecclesiastici was 
the official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. 
Whereas his criticism is no whit better than theirs, he 
adopted the cunning policy, unfortunately widely ob- 
taining since his day, of simply ignoring or suppress- 
ing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the in- 
ferences drawm from them. His talent for switching 
the attention to a side-issue, and for tangling instead 
of clearing problems, made the Protestants justly re- 
gard him as ''a great deceiver" though even the most 
learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, Avho attempted to refute 
him, found the work difficult. 

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest 
over the Reformation itself. A certain class of Prot- 
estant works, of which Crespin's Book of Martyrs, 1554 
Beza's Ecclesiastical History and John Foxe's Acts ^^^^ 
and Monuments (first English edition, 1563), are ex- 
amples, catered to the passions of the multitude by 
laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism 
and sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the 
cruelty of the persecutors. For many men the de- 



586 Mx\IN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

tailed description of isolated facts has a certain 
''thickness" of reality — if I may borrow William 
James's phrase — that is fomid by more complex minds 
only in the deduction of general causes. Passionate, 

Foxe partisan and sometimes ribald, Foxe won the reward 

that waits on demagogues. When it came to him as an 
afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into a gen- 
eral history, he plagiarized the Magdeburg Centuries. 
The reliability of his original narrative has been im- 
pugned with some success, though it has not been fully 
or impartially investigated. Much of it being drawn 
from personal recollection or from unpublished rec- 
ords, its sole value consists for us in its accuracy. I 
have compared a small section of the work with the 
manuscript source used by Foxe and have made the 
rather surprising discovery that though there are wide 
variations, none of them can be referred to partisan 
bias or to any other conceivable motive. In this in- 
stance, which is too small to generalize, it is possible 
that Foxe either had supplementary information, or 
that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his 
work must be used with caution. 

Knox Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox 's 

History of the Reformation of Religion within the 
Realm of Scotland (written 1559-71). In style it is 
rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the essential and a 
no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its in- 
tention to be ''a faithful rehearsal of such personages 
as God has made instruments of his glory," though 
thus equivocally stated, is carried out in an honorable 
sense. It is true that the writer never harbored a 
doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instru- 
ment of God's glory, nor that **the Roman Kirk is the 
synagogue of Satan and the head thereof, called the 
pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh." 
If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get impar- 



HISTORY 587 

tiality, neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's 
honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphle- 
teer, he did not falsify or suppress essential facts as 
he understood them himself. 

In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the Bullmger 
fair appearance of impartiality presented in Henry 
Bullinger's History of the Reformation 1519-32. 
Here, too, we meet with excellent composition, but with 
a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that 
the author's professions of fairness are sincere, though 
at times the temptation to omit recording unedifying 
facts, such as the sacramentarian schism, is too strong 
for him. 

Before passing judgment on anything it is necessary Sleidan 
to know it at its best. Probably John Sleidan 's Re- 
ligion's and political History of the reign of Charles V 1^55 
was the best work on the German Reformation written 
before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more elo- 
quent and acute, Scckendorf more learned, Gilbert 
Burnet had better perspective, but none of these writ- 
ers was better informed than Sleidan, or as objective. 
For the first and only time he really combined the two 
genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the ecclesi- 
astical. He is not blind to some of the cultural 
achievements of the Reformation. One of the things 
for which he praises Luther most is for ornamenting 
and enriching the German language. Sleidan 's faults 
are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff 
division of the subject by years. He put in a number 
of insignificant facts, such as the flood of the Tiber 
and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was he 
above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses 
and in monsters. He cited documents broadly and on 
the whole fairly, but not with painstaking accuracy. 
He offered nothing on the causes leading up to the 
Reformation, nor on the course of the development of 



588 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



Sanders 
1585 



Loyola 



1553^-6 



Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor 
on the life and tlioug-ht of the people. But he wrote 
fluently, acceptably to his public, and temperately. 

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had 
less to offer of notable histories than had the Protest- 
ants. A succes de scandale was won by Nicholas San- 
ders' Origin and Progress of the English Schism. 
Among the nasty bits of gossip Avith which *'Dr. 
Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his 
audience, some are absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn 
was Henry YIlI's daughter. As the books from which 
he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is 
impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from 
others and how far he gave rein to his imagination. 

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that 
was written in the sixteenth century is the autobiog- 
raphy of Ignatius Loyola, dictated by him to Lewis 
Gonzalez and taken dovm. partly in Spanish and partly 
in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is its 
insight into the author's o\vn character gained by long 
years of careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis 
is psychological, on the inner stniggle and not on the 
outward manifestations of saintliness, such as visions. 
It was taken over in large part verbatim in Ribade- 
neira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all 
other attemjits at ecclesiastical biography in the six- 
teenth century, notably the lives of Luther by the 
Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius, 
las: far in the dusty rear. 



§ 3. PoLJTicAL Theory 

Premises The great era of the state naturally shone in polit- 

ical thought. Though there was some scientific inves- 
tigation of social and economic laws, thought was 
chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced. 
From the long medieval dream of a universal .empire 



POLITICAL THEORY 589 

and a universal church, men awoke to find themselves 
in the presence of new entities, created, to be sure, by 
their own spirits, but all unwittingly. One of these 
was the national state, whose essence was power and 
the law of whose life was expansion to the point of 
meeting equal or superior force. No other factor in 
history, not even religion, has produced so many wars 
as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the 
name of patriotism. Within the state the shift of sov- 
ereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie 
necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was 
the triumph, with the rich, of the monarchy and of 
the parliaments, that pointed the road of some pub- 
licists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and 
others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There 
were even a few egalitarians who claimed for all classes 
a democratic regime. And, thirdly, the Reformation 
gave a new turn to the old problem of the relationship 
of church and state. It was on premises gathered 
from these three phenomena that the publicists of that 
age built a dazzling structure of political thought. 

It was chiefly the first of these problems that ab- Machiavdli, 

1'169— 1527 

sorbed the attention of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most 
brilliant, the most studied and the most abused of 
political theorists. As between monarchy and a re- 
pu])lic he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely 
to be the stronger, but he clearly saw that where eco- 
nomic equality prevailed political equality was natural 
and inevitable. The masses, he thought, desired only 
security of person and property, and would adhere to 
either form of government that offered them the best 
chance of these. For republic and monarchy alike 
Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft, 
those for the former embodied in his Discourses on 
Livy, those for the latter in his Prince. In erecting a 
new science of statecraft, by which a people might ar- 



Politics 
divorced 



590 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

rive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli 's great merit 
is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the 
old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect 
is that he set before his mind as a premise an abstract 
''political man" as far divorced from living, breath- 
ing, complex reality as the "economic man" of Ri- 
cardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, gov- 
erned by calculable motives of self-interest. In gen- 
eral, he thought, men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cow- 
ardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by an appeal 
to their greed, but chiefly by fear. 

Realist as he professed to be, Machiavelli divorced 
politics from morality. Whereas for Aristotle ^ and 
from Aquinas alike the science of jjolitics is a branch of 

morality etliics, for Macliiavelli it is an abstract science as 
totally dissociated from morality as is mathematics or 
surgery. The prince, according to Machiavelli, should 
appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, religious and 
upright, but should be able to act otherwise without 
the least scruple when it is to his advantage to do so. 
His heroes are Ferdinand of Aragon, "a prince who 
always preaches good faith but never practises it," 
and Caesar Borgia, "who did everything that can be 
done by a prudent and virtuous man ; so that no better 
precepts can be offered to a new prince than those sug- 
gested by the example of his actions." What the 
Florentine publicist especially admired in Caesar's 
statecraft were some examples of consummate perfidy 
and violence which he had the opportunity of observ- 
ing at first hand. Machiavelli made a sharp distinc- 
tion between private and public virtue. The former 
he jDrofessed to regard as binding on the individual, 
as it was necessary to the public good. It is note- 
worthy that this advocate of all hypocrisy and guile 

1 In Greek the words "politics" and "etliics" both have a wider mean- 
ing than they have in English. 



POLITICAL THEORY 591 

and violence on the part of the government was in his Public vs. 
own life gentle, aifectionate and true to trust. Reli- P^^'^^t^'^^ 
gion Machiavelli regarded as a valuable instrument of 
tyranny, but he did not hold the view, attributed by 
Gibbon to Roman publicists, that all religions, though 
to the philosopher equally false, were to the statesman 
equally useful. Christianity he detested, not so much, 
as an exploded superstition, as because he saw in it 
theoretically the negation of those patriotic, military 
virtues of ancient Rome, and because practically the 
papacy had prevented the union of Italy. Naturally 
Machiavelli cherished the army as the prime interest 
of the state. In advocating a national militia with 
universal training of citizens he anticipated the con- 
script armies of the nineteenth century. 

This writer, speaking the latent though unavowed 
ideals of an evil generation of public men, was re- 
warded by being openly vilified and secretly studied. 
He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear 
of moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas 
Cromwell and Francis Bacon chewed, swallowed and 
digested his pages, the dramatist had only to put in a 
sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the 
Florentine — and there were very many such allusions 
to him on the Elizabethan stage — to be sure of a round 
of applause from the audience. While Machiavelli 
found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were 
numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works 
were written by the evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang 
amen and the church put his writings on the Index. 
The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition. 
x\mong them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his 
morals but his talent, saying that his maxims were 
dra\vn from an observation of small states only, and 
that his judgment of the policy suitable to large na- 
tions was of the poorest. 



592 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

It is fair to try The Prince by the author's own 
standards. He did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, 
to describe what men ought to be but what they ac- 
tually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but 
as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his 
own purpose, "for w^hat he put aside . . . were noth- 
ing less than the living forces by which societies sub- 
sist and governments are strong. ' ' ^ Calvin succeeded 
where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points 
out, because he put the moral ideal first. 
Erasmus The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not 

forthcoming from the camp of the Reformers, but from 
that of the northern humanists, Erasmus and More. 
The Institution of a Christian Prince, by the Dutch 
scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Vir- 
tue is inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, 
who can be considered good only in proportion as he 
fosters the wealth and the education of his people. He 
should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live par- 
simoniously off his own estate. He should never make 
war, save when absolutely necessary, even against the 
Infidel, and should negotiate only such treaties as have 
for their principal object the prevention of armed con- 
flict. 

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is 
Erasmus 's preference for the republican form of gov- 
ernment. In the Christian Prince, dedicated as it was 
to the emperor, he spoke as if kings might and perhaps 
ought to be elected, but in his Adages he interpreted 
the spirit of the ancients in a way most disparaging 
-■ to monarchy. Considering how carefully this work 
was studied by promising youths at the impressionable 
age, it is not too much to regard it as one of the main 
sources of the marked republican current of thought 
throughout the century. Under the heading, "Fools 

1 Lord Morley, 



POLITICAL THEORY 593 

and kings are bom such, ' ' he wrote : ' ' In all history, 
ancient and recent, you will scarcely find in the course 
of several centuries one or two princes, who, by their 
signal folly, did not bring ruin on humanity." In 
another place, after a similar remark, he continues : 

I know not whether much of this is not to be imputed 
to ourselves. We trust the rudder of a vessel, where a 
few sailors and some goods alone are in jeopardy, to 
none but skilful pilots; but the state, wherein is com- 
prised the safety of so many thousands, we leave to the 
guidance of any chance hands. A charioteer must learn, 
reflect upon and practice his art ; a prince needs only to 
be born. Yet government is the most difficult, as it is the 
most honorable, of sciences. Shall we choose the master 
of a ship and not choose him who is to have the care of 
so many cities and so many souls? . . . Do we not see 
that noble cities are erected by the people and destroyed 
by princes? that a state grows rich by the industry of 
its citizens and is plundered by the rapacity of its 
princes ? that good laws are enacted by elected magistrates 
and violated by kings? that the people love peace and 
the princes foment war? 

There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, 
which in all makes a polemic against monarchy not 
exceeded by the fiercest republicans of the next two 
generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this 
in 1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. 
*' Princes must be endured," he then thought, ''lest 
tyranny give place to anarchy, a still greater evil." 

As one of the principal causes of the Reformation Reforma- 
was the strengthening of national self-consciousness, 
so conversely one of the most marked results of the 
movement was the exaltation of the state. The Refor- 
mation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the 
separation of church and state, and it endowed the 
latter with much wealth, with many privileges and 
^vith high prerogatives and duties up to that time be- 



tion 



594 MAIN CUERENTS OF THOUGHT 



Erastus, 
1524-83 
Hobbcs, 
1588-1679 



Luther 



lougiiii>- to the former. It is true that all the innova- 
tors would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which 
is not found in the theses of Thomas Erastus, but in 
the free-tliinkor Thomas Hobbos. AYhereas the Re- 
formers merely said that the state should be charged 
with the duty of enforcing orthodox}' and punishing 
sinners, Hobbes drew the logical inference that the 
state was the final authority for determining religious 
truth. That Hobbes 's conclusion was only the reduc- 
tio ad ahsurdum of the Reformation doctrine was hid- 
den from the Reformers themselves by their very 
strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable religious 
truth.^ 

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the 
state took two divergent forms according to their un- 
derstanding of what the state w\as. Lutheranism be- 
came the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvin- 
ism had in it a republican element. It is no accident 
that Germany developed a form of government in which 
a paternal but bureaucratic care of the people sup- 
plied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, 
on the whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, 
carried to its logical conclusion the idea of the rule of 
the majority. The English Reformation was at first 
Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it began to 
take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the 
Coniinonwoalth. 

AVhile Luther cared enormously for social reform, 
and did valiant service in its cause, he harbored a dis- 
trust of the people that grates harshly on modern ears. 
Especially after the excesses of the Peasants' War and 
the extravagance of jMiinzer, he came to believe that 
"Herr Omnes" was capable of little good and much 
evil. ''The princes of this world are gods," he once 
said, ''the common people are Satan, through whom 
Ood sometimes does what at other times he does di- 



POLITICAL THEORY 595 

rectly through Satan, i.e., makes rebellion as a pun- 
ishment for the people's sins." And a^ain: ^'I 
would rather suffer a prince doing wrong tlian a peo- 
ple doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely 
ordained "powers that be" was therefore the sole duty 
of the subject. '*It is in no wise proper for anyone 
who would be a Christian to set himself up against 
his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," 
he wrote in 1530. 

That Luther turned to the prince as the representa- 
tive of the divine majesty in the state is due not only 
to Scriptural autliority Ijut to the fact that there was 
no material for any other form of government to be 
found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he 
any illusions as to the character of hereditary mon- 
archs. In his Treatise on Civil Authority, dedicated I'^^.s 
to his own sovereign, Duke John of Saxony, he Avrote: 
''Since the foundation of the world a wise prince has 
been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They 
are generally the biggest fools and worst knaves on 
earth, wherefore one must always expect the worst 
of them and not much good, especially in divine mat- 
ters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to 
decide spiritual things, but only to enforce the deci- 
sions of the Christian community. 

Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth 
of the emperor and finding no warrant for the people to 
curb him, Luther groped for the notion of some legal 
limitation on the monarch's power. The word "con- 
stitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that 
the idea was present is certain. The German Empire 
had [I constitution, largely unwritten but partly statu- 
tory. The limitations on the imperial power were 
then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. AVhen 1507 
they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted 
the right of the German states to resist by force im- 



596 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



Reformed 
Church 



Zwingli 



Calvin 



perial acts of injustice contrary to positive laws. 
Moreover, he always maintained that no subject should 
obey an order directly contravening the law of God. 
In these limitations on the government's power, slight 
as they were, were contained the germs of the later 
Calvinistic constitutionalism. 

While many of the Reformers — Melanchthon, Bucer, 
Tyndale — were completely in accord with Luther's 
earlier doctrine of passive obedience, the Swiss, French 
and Scotch developed a consistent body of constitu- 
tional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered 
liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance 
in the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran church, 
was the form of ecclesiastical government. Congrega- 
tionalism and Presbyterianism are practical object- 
lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly 
pointed out in the case of America the influence of the 
vestry in the evolution of the town meeting. In other 
countries the same cause operated in the same way, 
giving the British and French Protestants ample prac- 
tice in representative government. Zwingli asserted 
that the subject should refuse to act contrary to his 
faith. From the Middle Ages he took the doctrine of 
the identity of spiritual and civil authority, but he also 
postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was natural 
in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were 
republican through and through. 

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his fol- 
lowers was in large part the result of the exigencies 
of their situation. Confronted with established power 
they were forced to defend themselves with pen as 
well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember 
of their thought was blown into fierce blaze by the 
Avinds of persecution. Not only the Huguenots took 
fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of 



POLITICAL THEORY 597 

France seemed on the point of anticipating the great 
Revolution by two centuries. 

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling dis- 
cordantly with the servile doctrines of Paul and Lu- 
ther, Calvin set to work to forge a theory that should 
combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further 
than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesi- 
astical authority, he yet regarded civil government as 
the most sacred and honorable of all merely human 
institutions. The form he preferred was an aristoc- 
racy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not 
prepared to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme 
cases. Grasping at Luther's idea of constitutional, 
or contractual, limitations on the royal power, he as- 
serted that the king should be resisted, when he vio- 
lated his rights, not by private men but by elected 
magistrates to whom the guardianship of the people's 
rights should be particularly entrusted. The high re- 
spect in which Calvin was held, and the clearness and 
comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately 
the most influential of the Protestant publicists. By 
his doctrine the Dutch, English, and American nations 
were educated to popular sovereignty. 

The seeds of liberty soato by Calvin might well have p^^^f^^^^' 
remained long hidden in the ground, had not the soil 
of France been irrigated with blood and scorched by 
the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of popular 
rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the 
jungle after the day of St. Bartholomew, were already 
sprouting some years before it. The Estates General 
that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded that the 
regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and 
that the members of the house of Lorraine and the 
Chancellor L'Hopital be removed from all offices as 
not having been appointed by the Estates. In August 



598 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



Beza 



Hotman, 
1573 



Vindiciae 
contra 
Tyrannos, 
1577 



of the same year, thirty-iiine representatives of the 
three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contempora- 
neously with the religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pon- 
toise, and there voiced with great boldness the claims 
of constitutional government. They demanded the 
right of the Estates to govern during the minority of 
the king; they claimed that the Estates should be sum- 
moned at least biennially; they forbade taxation, 
alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war 
without their consent. The further resolution that the 
persecution of the Huguenots should cease, betrayed 
the quarter from which the popular party drew its 
strength. 

But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried 
beyond the senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, fol- 
lowing hard upon the great massacre, trumpeted the 
sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore Beza 
published anonymously his Rights of Magistrates, de- 
veloping Calvin's theory that the representatives of 
the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the 
king. The pact between the people and king is said 
to be abrogated if the king violates it. 

At the same time another French Protestant, Fran- 
cis Hotman, published his F ranco-Gallia, to show that 
France had an ancient and inviolable constitution. 
This unwritten law regulates the succession to the 
throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the 
Estates General; by it the laws, binding even on the 
king, are made. The right of the people can be shown, 
in Hotman 's opinion, to extend even to deposing the 
monarch and electing his successor. 

A higher and more general view was taken in the 
Rights against Tyrants published under the pseudonym 
of Stephen Junius Brutus the Celt, and written by 
Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but comprehen- 
sive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Prot- 



POLITICAL THEORY 599 

estants, and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief sup- 
porter of tyranny, advanced four theses: 1. Subjects 
are bound to obey God rather than the king. This is 
regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates 
the church and violates God's law, he may be resisted 
at least passively as far as private men are concerned, 
but actively by magistrates and cities. The author, 
who quotes from the Bible and ancient history, evi- 
dently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The peo- 
ple may resist a tyrant who is oppressing or ruining 
the state. Originally, in the author's view, the people 
cither elected the king, or confirmed him, and if they 
have not exercised this right for a long time it is a 
legal maxim that no prescription can run against the 
public claims. Laws derive their sanction from the 
people, and should be made by them; taxes may only 
bo levied by their representatives, and the king who 
exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different 
from an enemy. The kings are not even the owners 
of public property, but only its administrators, are 
bound by the contract with the governed, and may be 
rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth 
thesis advanced by Mornay is that foreign aid may 
justly be called in against a tyrant. 

Not relying exclusively on their owm talents the ^a^^^fne. 
Huguenots were able to press into the ranks of their 
army of pamphleteers some notable Catholics. In 
1574 they published as a fragment, and in 1577 entire, 
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, commonly 
called the Contr'un, by Stephen de la Boetie. This 
gentleman, dying at the age of thirty-three, had left 
all his manuscripts to his bosom friend Montaigne. 
The latter says that La Boetie composed the work as a 
prize declamation at the age of sixteen or eighteen. 
But along with many passages in the pamphlet, which 
might have been suggested by Erasmus, are several 



1530-63 



1546-8 



600 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

allusions that seem to point to the character of Henry 
III — in 1574 king of Poland and in 1577 king of France 
— and to events just prior to the time of publication. 
According to an attractive hypothesis, not fully proved, 
these passages were added by Montaigne himself before 
he gave the work to one of his several Huguenot friends 
or kinsmen. La Boetie, at any rate, appealed to the 
passions aroused by St. Bartholomew in bidding the 
people no longer to submit to one man, *'the most 
wretched and effeminate of the nation," who has only 
two hands, two eyes, and who will fall if unsupported. 
And yet, he goes on rhetorically, ''you sow the fruits 
of the earth that he may waste them ; you furnish your 
houses for him to pillage them ; you rear your daugh- 
ters to glut his lust and your sons to perish in his 
wars; . . . you exhaust your bodies in labor that he 
may wallow in vile pleasures." 

As Montaigne and La Boetie were Catholics, it is 
pertinent here to remark that tyranny produced much 
the same effect on its victims, whatever their religion. 
Thg The Sorbonne, consulted by the League, unanimously 

Sorbonne decided that the people of France were freed from their 
oath of allegiance to Henry III and could with a good 
conscience take arms against him. One of the doctors, 
Boucher, wrote to prove that the church and the peo- 
ple had the right to depose an assassin, a perjurer, an 
impious or heretical prince, or one guilty of sacrilege 
or witchcraft. A tyrant, he concluded, was a wild 
beast, w^hom it was lawful for the state as a whole or 
even for private individuals, to kill. 

So firmly established did the doctrine of the con- 
tract between prince and people become that towards 
the end of the century one finds it taken for granted. 
The Memoires of the Huguenot soldier, poet and his- 
torian Agrippa d'Aubigne are full of republican senti- 
ments, as, for example, ''There is a binding obligation 



POLITICAL THEORY 601 

between the king and his subjects," and ''The power 
of the prince proceeds from the people." 

But it must not be imagined that such doctrines 
passed without challenge. The most important writer 
on political science after Machiavelli, John Bodin, was ?:J*i"q^ 
on the whole a conservative. In his writings acute 
and sometimes profound remarks jostle quaint and 
abject superstitions. He hounded the government and 
the mob on witches with the vile zeal of the authors 
of the Witches' Hammer; and he examined all existing 
religions with the coolness of a philosopher. He urged 
on the attention of the world that history was deter- 
mined in general by natural causes, such as climate, 
but that revolutions were caused partly by the in- 
scrutable will of God and partly by the more ascertain- 
able influence of planets. 

His most famous work, The Republic, is a criticism ^^"^^ 
of Machiavelli and an attempt to bring politics back 
into the domain of morality. He defines i\ state as a 
company of men united for the purpose of living well 
and happily ; he thinks it arose from natural right and 
social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates 
the state from the government, defining sovereignty 
(majestas) as the attribute of the former. He classi- 
fies governments in the usual three categories, and re- 
fuses to believe in mixed governments. Though Eng- 
land puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute mon- 
archy. This is the form that he decidedly prefers, 
for he calls the people a many-headed monster and says 
that the majority of men are incompetent and bad. 
Preaching passive obedience to the king, he finds no 
check on him, either by tyrannicide or by constitu- 
tional magistrates, save only in the judgment of God. 

It is singular that after Bodin had removed all ef- 
fective checks on the tyrant in this world, he should 
lay it do^vn as a principle that no king should levy 



602 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

taxes without his subjects' consent. Another contra- 
/ diction is that whereas he frees the subject from the 
duty of obedience in case the monarch commands aught 
against God 's law, he treats religion almost as a mat- 
ter of policy, advising that, whatever it be, the states- 
man should not disturb it. Apart from the streak of 
superstition in his mind, his inconsistencies are due to 
the attempt to reconcile opposites — Machiavelli and 
Calvin. For with all his denunciation of the former's 
atheism and immorality, he, with his chauvinism, his 
defence of absolutism, his practical opportunism, is not 
so far removed from the Florentine as he would have 
us believe. 

Dutch Ti^g revolution that failed in France succeeded in 

the Netherlands, and some contribution to political 
theory can be found in the constitution drawn up by 
the States General in 1580, when they recognized 
Anjou as their prince, and in the document deposing 
Philip in 1581. Both assume fully the sovereignty of 
the people and the omnicompetence of their elected 
representatives. As Oldenbarnevelt commented, "The 
cities and nobles together represent the whole state and 
the whole people." The deposition of Philip is justi- 
fied by an appeal to the law of nature, and to the ex- 
ample of other tortured states, and by a recital of 
Philip 's breaches of the laws and customs of the land. 

Knox Scotland, in the course of her revolution, produced 

almost as brilliant an array of pamphleteers as had 
France. John Knox maintained that, "If men, in the 
fear of God, oppose themselves to the fury and blind 
rage of princes, in doing so they do not resist God, 
but the devil, who abuses the sword and authority of 
God," and again, he asked, "What harm should the 
commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of ig- 
norant rulers were moderated and bridled by the wis- 



POLITICAL THEORY 603 

dom and discretion of godly subjects?" But the duty, '' 
he thought, to curb princes in free kingdoms and 
realms, does not belong to every private man, but "ap- 
pertains to the nobility, sworn and born counsellors 
of the same." Carrying such doctrines to the logical 
result, Knox hinted to Mary that Daniel might have 
resisted Nebuchadnezzar and Paul might have resisted 
Nero with the sword, had God given them the power. 

Another Scotch Protestant, John Craig, in support 
of the prosecution of Mary, said that it had been de- 
termined and concluded at the University of Bologna ^^^* 
that ''all rulers, be they supreme or inferior, may be 
and ought to be reformed or deposed by them by whom 
they were chosen, confirmed and admitted to their of- 
fice, as often as they break that promise made by oath 
to their subjects." Knox and Craig both argued for 
the execution of Mary on the ground that "it was a 
public speech among all peoples and among all estates, 
that the queen had no more liberty to commit murder 
nor adultery than any other private person." 
Knollys also told IMary that a monarch ought to be 
deposed for madness or murder. 

To the zeal for religion animating Knox, George 
Buchanan joined a more rational spirit of liberty and 
a stronger consciousness of positive right. His great 
work On the Constitution of Scotland derived all 
power from the people, asserted the responsibility of 
kings to their subjects and pleaded for the popular 
election of the chief magistrate. In extreme cases 
execution of the monarch was defended, though by 
w^hat precise machinery he was to be arraigned was 
left uncertain; probably constitutional resistance was 
thought of, as far as practicable, and tyrannicide was 
considered as a last resort. ' ' If you ask anyone, ' ' says 
our author, "what he thinks of the punislmient of 



Buchanan 



604 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

Caligula, Nero or Domitian, I think no one will be so 
devoted to the royal name as not to confess that they 
rightly paid the penalty of their crimes." 
English In England the two tendencies, the one to favor the 

monarchists (j^yine right of kings, the other for constitutional re- 
straint, existed side by side. The latter opinion was 
attributed by courtly divines to the influence of Cal- 
vin. Matthew Hutton blamed the Reformer because 
''he thought not so well of a kingdom as of a 
popular state." ''God save us," wrote Archbishop 
Parker, "from such a visitation as Knox has attempted 
in Scotland, the people to be orderers of things. ' ' This 
distinguished prelate preached that disobedience to the 
queen was a greater crime than sacrilege or adultery, 
for obedience is the root of all virtues and the cause 
of all felicity, and "rebellion is not a single fault, like 
theft or murder, but the cesspool and swamp of all 
possible sins against God and man." Bonner was 
charged by the government of Mary to preach that 
all rebels incurred damnation. Much later Richard 
Hooker warned his countrymen that Puritanism en- 
dangered the prerogatives of crown and nobility, 
and But there were not wanting champions of the peo- 

repubhcans pig^ Reginald Pole asserted the responsibility of the 
sovereign, though in moderate language. Bishop John 
Ponet Avrote A Treatise on Politic Poiver to show that 
men had the right to depose a bad king and to assassi- 
nate a tyrant. The haughty Elizabeth herself often 
had to listen to drastic advice. When she visited 
Cambridge she was entertained by a debate on tyranni- 
cide, in which one bold clerk asserted that God might 
incite a regicide ; and by a discussion of the respective 
advantages of elective and hereditary monarchy, one 
speaker offering to maintain the former with his life 
and, if need be, with his death. When Elizabeth, after 
hearing a refractory Parliament, complained to the 



POLITICAL THEORY 605 

Spanish ambassador that ' ' she could not tell what those 
devils were after" his excellency replied, ''They want 
liberty, madam, and if princes do not look to them- 
selves" they will soon find that they are drifting' 
to revolution and anarchy. Significant, indeed, was 
the silent work of Parliament in building up the con- 
stitutional doctrine of its own omnicompetence and of 
its own supremacy. 

One striking aberration in the political theory of Tyrannicide 
that time was the prominence in it of the appeal to 
tyrannicide. Schooled by the ancients who sang the 
praises of Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the biblical 
example of Ehud and Eglon, and by various medieval 
publicists, and taught the value of murder by the 
princes and popes who set prices on each other's heads, 
an extraordinary number of sixteenth century di\T.ncs 
approved of the dagger as the best remedy for tyranny. 
Melanchthon wished that God would raise up an able 
man to slay Henry VIII; John Ponet and Cajetan and 
the French theologian Boucher admitted the possible 
virtue of assassination. But the most elaborate state- 
ment of the same doctrine was put by the Spanish 
Jesuit Mariana, in a book On the King and liis Educa- 
tion published in 1599, with an official imprimatur, a 
dedication to the reigning monarch and an assertion 
that it was approved by learned and grave men of the 
Society of Jesus. It taught that the prince holds sway 
solely by the consent of the people and by ancient law, 
and that, though his vices are to be borne up to a cer- 
tain point, yet when he ruins the state he is a public 
enemy, to slay whom is not only permissible but glo- 
rious for any man brave enough to despise his own 
safety for the public good. 

If one may gather the official theory of the Catholic 
church from the contradictory statements of her doc- 
tors, she advocated despotism tempered by assassina- 



606 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

tion. No Lutheran ever preached the duty of passive 
obedience more strongly than did the Catechism of the 
Council of Trent. 

Radicals A word must be said about the more radical thought 

of the time. All the writers just analysed saw things 
from the standpoint of the governing and propertied 
classes. But the voice of the poor came to be heard 
now and then, not only from their own mouths but 
from that of the few authors who had enough imagina- 
tion to sympathize with them. 'The idea that men 
might sometime live without -any government at all 
is found in such widely different writers as Richard 
Hooker and Francis Rabelais. But socialism was 
then, as ever, more commonly advocated than anarchy. 
The Anabaptists, particularly, believed in a community 
of goods, and even tried to practice it when they got the 
chance. Though they failed in this, the contributions 
to democracy latent in their egalitarian spirit must 
not be forgotten. They brought do^vn on themselves 
the severest animadversions from defenders of the 
existing order, by whatever confession they were 

1535 bound. Vives wrote a special tract to refute the argu- 

ments of the Anabaptists on communism. Luther said 
that the example of the early Christians did not au- 
thorize communism for, though the first disciples 
pooled their own goods, they did not try to seize the 
property of Pilate and Herod. Even the French Cal- 
vinists, in their books dedicated to liberty, referred to 
the Anabaptists as seditious rebels worthy of the se- 

Utopia, verest repression. 

1516 A nobler work than any produced by the Anabap- 

tists, and one that may have influenced them not a little, 
was the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. He drew partly 
on Plato, on Tacitus 's Germania, on Augustine and on 
Pico della Mirandola, and for the outward framework 
of his book on the Four Voyages of Americus Vespuc- 



POLITICAL THEORY 607 

cius. But he relied mostly on his owti observation of 
what was rotten in the English state where he was a 
judge and a ruler of men. He imagined an ideal coun- 
try, Utopia, a place of perfect equality economically 
as well as politically. It was by government an elec- 
tive monarchy with inferior magistrates and represen- 
tative assembly also elected. The people changed 
houses every ten years by lot; they considered luxury 
and wealth a reproach. ''In other places they speak 
still of the common wealth but every man procureth 
his private wealth. Here where nothing is private 
the common affairs be earnestly looked upon." 
''What justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or usurer 
should have a pleasant and wealthy living either by 
idleness or by unnecessary occupation, when in the 
meantime poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpen- 
ters and plowTnen by so great and continual toil . . . 
do yet get so hard and so poor a living and live so 
wretched a life that the condition of the laboring beasts 
may seem much better and wealthier?" "When I 
consider and weigh in my mind all these common- The corn- 
wealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God monwealth 
help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy 
of rich men procuring their own commodities under the 
name and title of the commonwealth." More was 
convinced that a short day's labor shared by everyone 
would produce quite suflScient wealth to keep all in 
comfort. He protests explicitly -against those who 
pretend that there are two sorts of justice, one for gov- 
ernments and one for private men. He repudiates 
the doctrine that bad faith is necessary to the pros- 
perity of a state ; the Utopians form no alliances and 
carry out faithfully the few and necessary treaties 
that thej ratify. Moreover they dishonor war above 
all things. 
In the realm of pure economic and social theory 



608 MAIN CURKENTS OF THOUGHT 

something, though not much, was done. Machiavelli 
believed that the gro^vth of population in the north 
and its migration southwards was a constant law, an 
idea derived from Paulus Diaconus and handed on to 
Milton. He even derived ''Germany" from ''germi- 
nare." A more acute remark, anticipating Malthus, 
was made by the Spanish Jesuit John Botero who, in 
Botero, his Reasou of State, pointed out that population was 
^^^^ absolutely dependent on means of subsistence. He 

concluded a priori that the population of the world 
had remained stationary for three thousand years. 
Mercantile Statesmen then labored under the vicious error, 
economics drawn f rom the -analogy of a private man and a state, 
that national wealth consisted in the precious metals. 
The stringent and universal laws against the export of 
specie and intended to encourage its import, proved 
a considerable burden on trade, though as a matter of 
fact they only retarded and did not stop the flow of 
coin. The striking rise in prices during the century 
attracted some attention. Various causes were as- 
signed for it, among others the growth of population 
and the increase of luxury. Hardly anyone saw that 
the increase in the precious metals was the fundamen- 
tal cause, but several writers, among them Bodin, John 
Hales and Copernicus, saw that a debased currency 
was responsible for the acute dearness of certain local 
markets. 
Usury The lawfulness of the taking of usury greatly exer- 

cised the minds of men of that day. The church on 
traditional grounds had forbidden it, and her doctors 
stood fast by her precept, though 'an occasional indi- 
vidual, like John Eck, could be found to argue for it. 
Luther was in principle against allowing a man *'to 
sit behind his stove and let his money work for him," 
but he weakened enough to allow moderate interest in 
given circumstances. Zwingli would allow interest to 



method 



SCIENCE 609 

be taken only as a form of profit-sharing. Calvin said : 
''If we forbid usuiy wholly we bind consciences by a 
bond straiter than that of God himself. But if we 
allow it the least in the world, under cover of our per- 
mission someone will immediately make a general and 
unbridled licence." The laws against the taking of 
interest were gradually relaxed throughout the cen- 
tury, but even at its close Bacon could only regard 
usury as a concession made on account of the hard- 
ness of men's hearts. 

§ 4. Science 

The glory of sixteenth-century science is that for the inductive 
first time, on a large scale, since the ancient Greeks, 
did men try to look at nature through their o^\ai eyes 
instead of through those of Aristotle and the Physi- 
ologus. Bacon and Vives have each been credited 
with the discovery of the inductive method, but, like so 
many philosophers, they merely generalized a practice 
already common at their time. Save for one discovery 
of the first magnitude, and two or three others of some 
little importance, the work of the sixteenth century was 
that of observing, describing and classifying facts. 
This was no small service in itself, though it does not 
strike the imagination as do the great new theories. 

In mathematics the preparatory work for the state- Mathe- 
ment and solution of new problems consisted in the 
perfection of symbolism. As reasoning in general is 
dependent on words, as music is dependent on the me- 
chanical invention of instruments, so mathematics can- 
not progress far save with a simple and adequate 
symbolism. The introduction of the Arabic as against 
the Roman numerals, and particularly the introduction 
of the zero in reckoning, for the first time, in the later 
Middle Ages, allowed men to perform conveniently the 
four fundamental processes. The use of the signs -{- 



matics 



610 MAIN CUEEENTS OF THOUGHT 

and — for plus and minus (formerly written p. and 
m.), and of the sign = for equality and of V for root, 
Avere additional conveniences. To this might be added 
the popularization of decimals by Simon Stevin in 
1586, which he called 'Hhe art of calculating by whole 
numbers without fractions." How clumsy are all 
things at their birth is illustrated by his method of 
writing decimals by putting them as powers of one- 
tenth, with circles around the exponents; e.g., the 
number that we should write 237.578, he wrote 
237 ° 5 ^ 7 ^ 8 ^. He first declared for decimal systems 
of coinage, weights and measures. 

Algebraic notation also improved vastly in the pe- 
riod. In a treatise of Lucas Paciolus we find cum- 
brous signs instead of letters, thus no. (numero) for 
the known quantity, co. (cosa) for the unknown quan- 
tity, ce. (censo) for the square, and cu. (cubo) for the 
cube of the unknown quantity. As he still used p. and 
m. for plus and minus, he wrote 3co.p.4ce.m.5cu.p.2ce. 
ce.m.Gno. for the number we should write 3x -|- 4x^ — 
5x^ + 2x'* — 6a. The use of letters in the modern 
style is due to the mathematicians of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. The solution of cubic and of biquadratic equa- 
tions, at first only in certain particular forms, but later 
in all forms, was mastered by Tartaglia and Cardan. 
The latter even discussed negative roots, whether ra- 
tional or irrational. 

Geometry at that time, as for long afterwards, was 
dependent wholly on Euclid, of whose work a Latin 
translation was first joublished at Venice. Copernicus 
with his pupil George Joachim, called Eheticus, and 
Francis Vieta, made some progress in trigonometry. 
Copernicus gave the first simple demonstration of the 
fundamental formula of spherical trigonometry; 
Eheticus made tables of sines, tangents and secants 



SCIENCE 611 

of arcs. Vieta discovered the formula for deriving 
the sine of a multiple angle. 

As one turns the pages of the numerous works of Cardan, 
Jerome Cardan one is astonished to find the number ^^^^-'^^ 
of subjects on which he wrote, including, in mathe- 
matics, choice and chance, arithmetic, algebra, the cal- 
endar, negative quantities, and the theory of numbers. 
In the last named branch it was another Italian, Mau- 
rolycus, who recognized the general character of mathe- 
matics as ''symbolic logic." He is indeed credited 
with understanding the most general principle on 
which depends all mathematical deduction.^ Some of 
the most remarkable anticipations of modern science 
were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic 
matter was animated, and that all nature was a pro- 
gressive evolution. Thus his statement that all ani- 
mals were originally worms implies the indefinite vari- 
ability of species, just as his remark that inferior met- 
als were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce 
gold, might seem to foreshadow the idea of the trans- 
mutation of metals under the influence of radioactivity. 
It must be remembered that such guesses had no claim 
to be scientific demonstrations. 

The encyclopaedic character of knowledge was then, 
perhaps, one of its most striking characteristics. Ba- 
con was not the first man of his century to take all 
knowledge for his province. In learning and breadth 
of view few men have ever exceeded Conrad Gesner, Gesner, 
called by Cuvier ''the German Pliny." His History 
of Animals (published in many volumes 1551-87) was 
the basis of zoology until the time of Darwin. lie Zoiilogy 

1 I.e. the principle thus formulated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
s.v. "■^Mathematics" : "If s is any class and zero a member of it, also 
if when X is a cardinal number and a member of s, also x + 1 is a 
member of s, then the whole class of cardinal numbers is contained 



612 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

drew largely on previous writers, Aristotle and Al- 
bertus Magnus, but he also took pains to see for him- 
self as much as possible. The excellent illustrations 
for his book, partly drawn from previous works but 
mostly new, added greatly to its value. His classifica- 
tion, though superior to any that had preceded it, was 
in some respects astonishing, as when he put the hip- 
popotamus among aquatic animals with fish, and the 
bat among birds. Occasionally he describes a purely 
mythical animal like "the monkey-fox." It is diffi- 
cult to see what criterion of truth would have been 
adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox 
is no more improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner 
found it necessary to assure his readers that the 
rhinoceros really existed in nature and was not a crea- 
tion of fancy. 

As the master of modern anatomy and of several 
Leonardo other branches of science, stands Leonardo da Vinci. 
It is difficult to appraise his work accurately because it 
is not yet fully kno^\^l, and still more because of its 
extraordinary form. He left thousands of pages of 
notes on everything and hardly one complete treatise 
on anything. He began a hundred studies and finished 
none of them. He had a queer twist to his mind that 
made him, with all his power, seek byways. The mon- 
strous, the uncouth, fascinated him; he saw a Medusa 
in a spider and the universe in a drop of water. He 
wrote his notes in mirror-writing, from right to left; 
he illustrated them with a thousand fragments of ex- 
quisite drawing, all unfinished and tantalizing alike to 
the artist and to the scientist. His mind roamed to 
flying machines and submarines, but he never made 
one; the reason given by him in the latter case being 
his fear that it would be put to piratical use. He had 
something in him of Faust; in some respects he re- 
minds us of William James, who also started as a 



SCIENCE 613 

painter and ended as an omniverous student of outre 
things and as a psychologist. 

If, therefore, the anatomical drawings made by Anatomy 
Leonardo from about twenty bodies that he dissected, 
are marvellous specimens of art, he left it to others 
to make a really systematic study of the human body. 
His contemporary, Borengar of Carpi, professor at 
Bologna, first did this with marked success, classify- 
ing the various tissues as fat, membrane, flesh, nerve, 
fibre and so forth. So far from true is it that it was 
difficult to get corpses to work upon that he had at least 
a hundred. Indeed, according to Fallopius, another 
famous scientist, the Duke of Tuscany would occasion- 
ally send live criminals to be vivisected, thus making 
their punishment redound to the benefit of science. 
The Inquisitors made the path of science hard by burn- 
ing books on anatomy as materialistic and indecent. 

Two or three investigators anticipated Harvey's dis- Servetus 
covery of the circulation of the blood. Unfortunately, 
as the matter is of interest, Servetus 's treatment of 
the subject, found in his work on The Trinity, is too 
long to quote, but it is plain that, along with various 
fallacious ideas, he had really discovered the truth that 
the blood all passes through heart and lungs whence it 
is returned to the other organs. 

"While hardly anything was done in chemistry, a Physics 
large number of phenomena in the field of physics were 
observed now for the first time. Leonardo da Vinci 
measured the rapidity of falling bodies, by dropping 
them from towers and having the time of their pas- 
sage at various stages noted. He thus found, cor- 
rectly, that their velocity increased. It is also said 
that he observed that bodies always fell a little to the 
eastward of the plumb line, and thence concluded that 
the earth revolved on its axis. He made careful ex- 
periments with billiard balls, discovering that the mo- 



614 MAIN CUERENTS OF THOUGHT 

mentum of the impact always was preserved entire 
in the motion of the balls struck. He measured forces 
by the weight and speed of the bodies and arrived at 
an approximation of the ideas of mechanical ''work" 
and energy of position. He thought of energy as a 
spiritual force transferred from one body to another 
by touch. This remarkable man further invented a 
hygrometer, explained sound as a wave-motion in the 
air, and said that the appearance Imown to us as ''the 
old moon in the new moon's lap" was due to the reflec- 
tion of earth-light. 

Nicholas Tartaglia first showed that the course of a 
projectile was a parabola, and that the maximum range 
of a gun would be at an angle of 45°. 

Some good work was done in optics. John Baptist 
della Porta described, though he did not invent, the 
camera obscura. Burning glasses were explained. 
Leonard Digges even anticipated the telescope by the 
use of double lenses. 

Further progress in mechanics was made by Cardan 
who explained the lever and pulley, and by Simon 
Stevin who first demonstrated the resolution of forces. 
He also noticed the difference between stable and un- 
stable equilibrium, and showed that the downward 
pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of the 
vessel it is in and is dependent only on the height. He 
and other scholars asserted the causation of the tides 
by the moon. 
Magnetism Magnetism was much studied. When compasses 
were first invented it was thought that they always 
pointed to the North Star under the influence of some 
stellar compulsion. But even in the fifteenth century 
it was noticed independently by Columbus and by Ger- 
man experimenters that the needle did not point true 
north. As the amount of its declination varies at dif- 



SCIENCE 615 

ferent places on the earth and at different times, this 
was one of the most puzzling- facts to explain. One 
man believed that the change depended on climate, 
another that it was an individual property of each 
needle. About 1581 Kobert Noraian discovered the 
inclination, or dip of the compass. These and other 
observations were summed up by William Gilbert in his Gilbert 
work on The Magnet, Magnetic Bodies and the Earth 
as a great Magnet. A great deal of his space was 1600 
taken in that valuable destructive criticism that refutes 
prevalent errors. His greatest discovery was that the 
earth itself is a large magnet. He thought of mag- 
netism as "a soul, or like a soul, which is in many 
things superior to the human soul as long as this is 
bound by our bodily organs." It was therefore an 
appetite that compelled the magnet to point north and 
south. Similar explanations of physical and chem- 
ical properties are found in the earliest and in some of 
the most recent philosophers. 

As might be expected, the science of geography, Geography 
nourished by the discoveries of new lands, grew might- 
ily. Even the size of the earth could only be guessed 
at until it had been encircled. Columbus believed that 
its circumference at the equator was 8000 miles. The 
stories of its size that circulated after Magellan were 
exaggerated by the people. Thus Sir David Ljnidsay 
in his poem The Dreme quotes "the author of the 1523 
sphere" as saying that the earth was 101,750 miles in 
circumference, each mile being 5000 feet. The author 
referred to was the thirteenth century Johannes de 
Sacro Bosco (John Holywood). Two editions of his 
work, De Sphaera, that I have seen, one of Venice, 
1499, and one of Paris, 1527, give the circumference 
of the earth as 20,428 miles, but an edition published 
at Wittenberg in 1550 gives it as 5,400, probably an 



616 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



1551 



1507 



Mercator, 
1512-94 



Astronomy 



attempt to reduce the author's English miles to Ger- 
man ones. Robert Recorde calculated the earth's cir- 
cumference at 21,300 miles. ^ 

Rough maps of the new lands were drawn by the 
companions of the discoverers. Martin Waldseemiiller 
published a large map of the world in twelve sheets 
and a small globe about 4^/2 inches in diameter, in 
which the new world is for the first time called Amer- 
ica. The next great advance was made by the Flemish 
cartographer Gerard Mercator whose globes and maps 
— some of them on the projection since called by his 
name — are extraordinarily accurate for Europe and 
the coast of Africa, and fairly correct for Asia, though 
he represented that continent as too narrow. He in- 
cluded, however, in their approximately correct posi- 
tions, India, the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java and 
Japan. America is very poorly drawn, for though 
the east coast of North America is fairly correct, the 
continent is too broad and the rest of the coasts vague. 
He made two startling anticipations of later discover- 
ies, the first that he separated Asia and America by 
only a narrow strait at the north, and the second that 
he assumed the existence of a continent around the 
south pole. This, however, he made far too large, 
thinking that the Tierra del Fuego was part of it and 
drawing it so as to come near the south coast of Africa 
and of Java. His maps of Europe were based on re- 
cent and excellent surveys. 

Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, had made 
much progress in the tabulation of material. The 
apparent orbits of the sun, moon, planets, and stars 
had been correctly observed, so that eclipses might be 
predicted, conjunction of planets calculated, and that 

1 Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) had correctly calculated the earth'8 
circumference at 25,000, which Poseidonius (c. 135-50 B.C.) reduced to 
18,000, in which he was followed by Ptolemy (2d century a. d.). 



SCIENCE 617 

gradual movement of the sun through the signs of the 
zodiac known as the precession of the equinoxes, taken 
account of. To explain these movements the ancients 
started on the theoiy that each heavenly body moved 
in a perfect circle around the earth; the fixed stars 
were assigned to one of a group of revolving spheres, 
the sun, moon and five planets each to one, making 
eight in all. But it was soon observ^ed that the move- 
ments of the planets were too complicated to fall into 
this system; the number of moving spheres was raised 
to 27 before Aristotle and to 56 by him. To these con- 
centric spheres later astronomers added eccentric 
spheres, moving within others, called epicycles, and to 
them epicycles of the second order ; in fact astronomers 
were compelled: 

To build, unbuild, contrive, 

To save appearances, to gird the sphere 

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er 

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. 

The complexity of this system, which moved the 
mirth of Voltaire and, according to Milton, of the Al- 
mighty, was such as to make it doubted by some think- 
ers even in antiquity. Several men thought the earth 
revolved on its axis, but the hypothesis was rejected by 
Aristotle and Ptolemy. Heracleides, in the fourth 
century b. c, said that Mercury and Venus circled 
around the sun, and in the third century Aristarchus 
of Samos actually anticipated, though it was a mere 
guess, the heliocentric theory. 

Just before Copernicus various authors seemed to 
hint at the truth, but in so mystical or brief a way that 
little can be made of their statements. Thus, Nicholas 
of Cusa argued that *'as the earth cannot be the cen- Nicholas 
ter of the universe it cannot lack all motion." Leon- \^q^^ 
ardo believed that the earth revolved on its axis, and 
stated that it was a star and would look, to a man on 



618 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

the moon, as the moon does to us. In one place he 
wrote, *'the smi does not move," — only that enigmat- 
ical sentence and nothing more. 
Copernicus, Nicholas Copernicus was a native of Thorn in Po- 
1473-1543 i^j^(-|^ himself of mixed Polish and Teutonic blood. At 
the age of eighteen he went to the university of Cra- 
cow, where he spent three years. In 1496 he was en- 
abled by an ecclesiastical appointment to go to Italy, 
where he spent most of the next ten j^ears in study. 
He worked at the universities of Bologna, Padua and 
Ferrara, and lectured — though not as a member of the 
university — at Rome. His studies were comprehen- 
sive, including civil law, canon law, medicine, mathe- 
matics, and the classics. At Padua, on May 31, 1503, 
he was made doctor of canon law. He also studied 
astronomy in Italy, talked with the most famous pro- 
fessors of that science and made observations of the 
heavens. 

Copernicus 's uncle was bishop of Ermeland, a spir- 
itual domain and fief of the Teutonic Order, under the 
supreme suzerainty, at least after 1525, of the king 
of Poland. Here Copernicus spent the rest of his life ; 
the years 1506-1512 in the bishop 's palace at Heilsberg, 
after 1512, except for two not long stays at Allenstein, 
as a canon at Frauenburg. 

This little town, near but not quite on the Baltic 
coast, is ornamented by a beautiful cathedral. On the 
wall surromiding the close is a small tower which the 
astronomer made his observatory. Here, in the long 
frosty nights of winter and in the few short hours of 
summer darkness, he often lay on his back examining 
the stars. He had no telescope, and his other instru- 
ments were such crude things as he put together him- 
self. The most important was what he calls the In- 
strumentum parallacticimi, a wooden isosceles tri- 
angle with legs eight feet long divided into 1000 divi- 



SCIENCE 619 

sions by ink marks, and a hypotenuse divided into 1414 
divisions. With this he determined the height of the 
sun, moon and stars, and their deviation from the 
vernal point. To this he added a square (quadrum) 
which told the height of the sun by the shadow thrown 
by a peg in the middle of the square. A third instru- 
ment, also to measure the height of a celestial body, 
was called the Jacob's staff. His difficulties were in- 
creased by the lack of any astronomical tables save 
those poor ones made by Greeks and Arabs. The 
faults of these were so great that the fundamental star, 
i.e., the one he took by which to measure the rest, 
Spica, was given a longitude nearly 40' out of the true 
one. 

Nevertheless with these poor helps Copernicus ar- Copemican 
rived, and that very early, at his momentous conclu- hypothesis 
sion. His observations, depending as they did on the 
weather, w^ere not numerous. His time -was spent 
largely in reading the classic astronomers and in work- 
ing out the mathematical proofs of his hypothesis. 
He found hints in quotations from ancient astronomers 
in Cicero and Plutarch that the earth moved, but he, 
for the first time, placed the planets in their true posi- 
tion around the sun, and the moon as a satellite of the 
earth. He retained the old conception of the primttm 
mobile or sphere of fixed stars though he placed it at 
an infinitely greater distance than did the ancients, to 
account for the absence of any observed alteration 
(parallax) in the position of the stars during the year. 
He also retained the old conception of circular orbits 
for the planets, though at one time ho considered the 
possibility of their being elliptical, as they are. Un- 
fortunately for his immediate followers the section 
on this subject found in his own manuscript was cut 
out of his printed book. 

The precise moment at which Copernicus formu- 



620 



MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



1520 



Narratio 

prima, 

1540 



De rcvolu- 

tionibus 

orbium 

caclestium, 

1543 



lated his theory in his o^vn mind cannot be told with 
certainty, but it was certainly before 1516. He kept 
back his books for a long time, but his light was not 
placed under -a bushel nevertheless. The first rays of 
it shown forth in a tract by Celio Calcagnini of which 
only the title, ''That the earth moves and the heaven 
is still," has survived. -Some years later Copernicus 
wrote a short summary of his book, for private circu- 
lation only, entitled ''A Short commentary on his hy- 
potheses concerning the celestial movements." A 
fuller account of them was given by his friend and 
disciple, George Joachim, called Rheticus, who left 
Wittenberg, where he was teaching, to sit at the mas- 
ter's feet, and who published what was called The First 
Account. 

Finally, Copernicus was persuaded to give his own 
work to the public. Foreseeing the opposition it was 
likely to call forth, he tried to forestall criticism by a 
dedication to the Pope Paul III. Friends at Nurem- 
berg undertook to find a printer, and one of them, the 
Lutheran pastor Andrew Osiander, with the best in- 
tentions, did the great wrong of inserting an anony- 
mous preface stating that the author did not advance 
his hypotheses as necessarily true, but merely as a 
means of facilitating astronomical calculations. At 
last the greatest work of the century. On the Revolu- 
tions of the Heavenly Spheres, came from the press; 
a copy was brought to the author on his death bed. 

The first of the six books examines the previous au- 
thorities, the second proposes the new theory, the third 
discusses the precession of the equinoxes, the fourth 
proves that the moon circles the earth, the fifth and 
most important proves that the planets, including the 
earth, move around the sun, and gives correctly the 
time of the orbits of all the planets then kno^vn, from 
Mercury with eighty-eight days to Saturn with thirty 



SCIENCE 621 

years. The sixth book is on the determination of lati- 
tude and longitude from the fixed stars. Copernicus 's 
proofs and reasons are absolutely convincing and valid 
as far as they go. It remained for Galileo and Newton 
to give further explanations and some modifications 
in detail of the new theory. 

When one remembers the enormous hubbub raised Reception 
by Darwin's Origin of Species, the reception of Coper- copernican 
nicus's no less revolutionary work seems singularly theory 
mild. The idea was too far in advance of the age, too 
great, too paradoxical, to be appreciated at once. 
Save for a few astronomers like Rheticus and Rein- 
hold, hardly anyone accepted it at first. It would have 
been miraculous had they done so. 

Among the first to take alarm were the Wittenberg 
theologians, to whose attention the new theory was 
forcibly brought by their colleague Rheticus. Luther 
alludes to the subject twice or thrice in his table talk, 
most clearly on June 4, 1539, when 

mention was made of a certain new astronomer, who tried 
to prove that the earth moved and not the sky, sun and 
moon, just as, when one was carried along hi a boat or 
wagon, it seemed to himself that he was still and that 
the trees and landscape moved. "So it goes now," said 
Luther, "whoever wishes to be clever must not let any- 
thing please him that others do, but must do something 
of his own. Thus he does who wishes to subvert the 
whole of astronomy; but I believe the Holy Scriptures, 
which say that Joshua commanded the sun, and not the 
earth, to stand still. 

In his Elements of Physics, written probably in 1545, 
but not published until 1549, Melanchthon said: 

The eyes bear witness that the sky revolves every 
twenty-four hours. But some men now, either for love 
of novelty, or to display their ingenuity, assert that the 
earth moves. . . . But it is hurtful and dishonorable to 



622 MAIN CUEEENTS OF THOUGHT 

assert such absurdities. . . . The Psalmist says that the 
sun moves and the earth stands fast. . . . And the earth, 
as the center of the universe, must needs be the immov- 
able point on which the circle turns. 

Apparently, however, Melanchthon either came to 
adopt the new theory, or to regard it as possible, for 
he left this passage entirely out of the second edition 

1550 of the same work. Moreover his relations with Rhet- 

icus continued warm, and Rheinhold continued to teach 
the Copernican system at Wittenberg. 

The reception of the new work was also surprisingly 
mild, at first, in Catholic circles. As early as 1533 
Albert Widmanstetter had told Clement VII of the 
Copernican hypothesis and the pope did not, at least, 
condemn it. Moreover it was a cardinal, Schonberg, 

1536 who consulted Paul III on the matter and then urged 

Copernicus to publish his book, though in his letter 
the language is so cautiously guarded against possible 
heresy that not a word is said about the earth mov- 
ing around the sun but only about the moon and the 

^^'^^ bodies near it so doing. A Spanish theologian, Dida- 

cus a Stunica (Zuiiiga) wrote a commentary on Job, 
which was licensed by the censors, accepting the Co- 
pernican astronomy. 

But gradually, as the implications of the doctrine 
became apparent, the church in self-defence took a 

March 5, strong stand against it. The Congregation of the In- 
dex issued a decree saying, ''Lest opinions of this sort 
creep in to the destruction of Catholic truth, the book 
of Nicholas Copernicus and others [defending his hy- 
pothesis] arc suspended until they be corrected." A 
little later Galileo was forced, under the threat of tor- 
ture, to recant this heresy. Only when the system had 
become universally accepted, did the church, in 1822, 
first expressly permit the faithful to hold it. 

The philosophers were as shy of the new light as 



1616 



SCIENCE 



623 



Brahe, 
1546-1601 



the theologians. Bodin in France and Bacon in Eng- 
land both rejected it; the former was conservative at 
lieart and the latter was never able to see good in 
other men's work, whether that of Aristotle or of Gil- 
bert or of the great Pole. Possibly he was also misled 
by Osiander's preface and by Tycho Brahe. Gior- 
dano Bruno, however, welcomed the new idea with 
enthusiasm, saying that Copernicus taught more in 
two chapters than did Aristotle and the Peripatetics 
in all their works. 

Astronomers alone were capable of weighing the evi- 
dence scientifically and they, at first, were also divided. 
Erasmus Reinhold, of Wittenberg, accepted it and 
made his calculations on the assumption of its truth, as 
did an Englishman, John Field. Tycho Brahe, on the ^^^^ 
other hand, tried to find a compromise between the Tycho 
Copemican and Ptolemaic systems. He argued that 
the earth could not revolve on its axis as the centrifugal 
force would hurl it to pieces, and that it could not re- 
volve around the sun as in that case a change in the 
position of the fixed stars would be observed. Both 
objections were well taken, of course, considered in 
themselves alone, but both could be answered by a 
deeper knowledge. Brahe therefore considered the 
earth as the center of the orbits of the moon, sun, and 
stars, and the sun as the center of the orbits of the 
planets. 

The attention to astronomy had two practical corol- 
laries, the improvement of navigation and the reform 
of the calendar. Several better forms of astrolabe, 
of ''sun-compass" (or dial turnable by a magnet) and 
an "astronomical ring" for getting the latitude and 
longitude by observation of sun and star, were intro- 
duced. 

The reform of the Julian calendar was needed on 
account of the imperfect reckoning of the length of the 



Reform of 
calendar 



624 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 



February 
24, 1582 



year as exactly 365^4 days ; thus every four centuries 
there would be three days too much. It was proposed 
to remedy this for the present by leaving out ten days, 
and for the future by omitting leap-^^ear every century 
not divisible by 400. The bull of Gregory XIII, who 
resumed the duties of the ancient Pontifex Maximus 
in regulating time, enjoined Catholic lands to rectify 
their calendar by allowing the fifteenth of October, 
1582, to follow immediately after the fourth. This 
was done by most of Italy, by Spain, Portugal, Poland, 
most of Germany, and the Netherlands. Other lands 
adopted the new calendar later, England not until 
1752 and Russia not until 1917. 



Science, 
religion 
and phil- 
osophy 



The Re- 
formers 



§ 5. Philosophy 

The interrelations of science, religion, and phi- 
losophy, though complex in their operation, are easily 
understood in their broad outlines. Science is the ex- 
amination of the data of experience and their explana- 
tion in logical, physical, or mathematical terms. Re- 
ligion, on the other hand, is an attitude towards un- 
seen powers, involving the belief in the existence of 
spirits. Philosophy, or the search for the ultimate 
reality, is necessarily an afterthought. It comes only 
after man is sophisticated enough to see some differ- 
ence between the phenomenon and the idea. It draws 
its premises from both science and religion : some sys- 
tems, like that of Plato, being primarily religious 
fancy, some, like that of Aristotle, scientific realism. 

The philosophical position taken by the Catholic 
church was that of Aquinas, Aristotelian realism. The 
official commentary on the Summa was written at this 
time by Cardinal Cajetan. Compared to the steady 
orientation of the Catholic, the Protestant philosophers 
wavered, catching often at the latest style in thought, 
^e it monism or pragmatism, Lutjier w^9 the spir- 



PHILOSOPHY 625 

itual child of Occam, and the ancestor of Kant. His 
individualism stood half-way between the former's 
nominalism and the latter 's transcendentalism and 
subjectivism. But the Keformers were far less in- 
terested in purely metaphysical than they were in 
dogmatic questions. The main use they made of their 
philosophy was to bring in a more individual and less 
mechanical scheme of salvation. Their great change 
in point of view from Catholicism was the rejection 
of the sacramental, hierarchical system in favor of 
justification by faith. This was, in tnith, a stupendous 
change, putting the responsibility for salvation di- 
rectly on God, and dispensing with the mediation of 
priest and rite. 

But it was the only important change, of a specula- Attitude 
tive nature, made by the Reformers. The violent Reason ^ 
polemics of that and later times have concealed the 
fact that in most of his ideas the Protestant is but a 
variety of the Catholic. Both religions accepted as 
axiomatic the existence of a personal, ethical God, the 
immortality of the soul, future rewards and punish- 
ments, the mystery of the Trinity, the revelation, in- 
carnation and miracles of Christ, the authority of the 
Bible and the real presence in the sacrament. Both 
equally detested reason. 

He who is ^fted with the heavenly knowledge of faith 
[says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from 
an inquisitive curiosity; for when God commands us to 
believe, he does not propose to have us search into his 
divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, 
but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore, 
excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of sub- 
jecting its truth to demonstration. 

We know that reason is the devil's harlot [says Lu- 
ther] and can do nothing but slander and harm all that 
God says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ, 
you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to 



626 MAIN CUREENTS OF THOUGHT 

God, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him 
who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what God 
is, and by doing so he will draw 3^ou into the abyss. 
Therefore keep to revelation and don't try to understand. 

There are many mysteries in the Bible, Luther ac- 
knowledged, that seem absurd to reason, but it is 
our duty to swallow them whole. Calvin abhorred 
the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy 
of free thought. He said that philosophy w^as only 
the shadow and revelation the substance. *'Nor is it 
reasonable," said he, ''that the divine will should be 
made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, 
anticipating Descartes 's "iinitum infiniti capax non 
est," stated that our small minds could not grasp God's 
plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no 
more light than he then had — an instructive contrast 
to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, 
either from prudence or conviction, said that theolog- 
ical mysteries seeming absurd to reason must be be- 
lieved. 
Radical Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. 

Those who represented the protest against Protestant- 
ism and the dissidence of dissent appealed to the Bible 
as an authority and abhorred reason as much as did 
the orthodox churches. The Antitrinitarians were no 
more deists or free thinkers than were the Lutherans. 
Campanus and Adam Pastor and Servetus and the 
Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made 
no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian 
deism, as some modern Unitarians would do. Their 
doubts were simply based on a different exegesis of 
the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was 
"a subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Su- 
preme God gave over the government of the world." 
Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an illusion of 
three invisible things, but the manifestation of God 



sects 



PHILOSOPHY 627 

in the Word and a communication of the substance of 
God in the Spirit." This is no new rationalism com- 
ing in but a reversion to an obsolete heresy, that of 
Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find 
Servetus lecturing on astrology. 

Somewhat to the left of the Antitrinitarian sects |p""""^^ 

Ketormers 

were a few men, who had hardly any followers, who 
may be called, for want of a better teim, Spiritual Re- 
formers. They sought, quite in the nineteenth cen- 
tury spirit, to make Christianity nothing but an eth- 
ical culture. James Acontius, born in Trent but nat- 1565 
uralized in England, published his Stratagems of Satan 
in 1565 to reduce the fundamental doctrines of Chris- 
tianity to the very fewest possible. Sebastian Franck 
of Ingolstadt found the only authority for each man in Franck, 
his inward, spiritual message. He sought to found no 
community or church, but to get only readers. These 
men passed almost unnoticed in their day. 

There was much skepticism throughout the century. Italian 
Complete Pyrrhonism under a thin veil of lip-con- ^^^p^'^^^ 
formity, was preached by Peter Pomponazzi, professor Pompon- 
of philosophy at Padua, Ferrara and Bologna. His 1525 
De immortalitate animi caused a storm by its plain 1515 
conclusion that the soul perished with the body. He 
tried to make the distinction in his favor that a thing 
might be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus 
he denied his belief in demons and spirits as a phi- 
losopher, while affirming that he believed in them as a 
Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He placed 
Christianity, ^Mohammedanism and Judaism on the 
same level, broadly hinting that all were impostures. 

Public opinion became so interested in the subject 
of immortality at this time that when another philoso- 
pher, Simon Porzio, tried to lecture on meteorology 
at Pisa, his audience interrupted him with cries, "Quid 
de anima ? ' ' He, also, maintained that the soul of man 



628 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

was like that of the beasts. But he had few followers 
who dared to express such an opinion. After the In- 
quisition had shown its teeth, the life of the Italian 
nation was like that of its great poet, Tasso, whose 
youth was spent at the feet of the Jesuits and whose 
manhood was haunted by fears of having unwittingly 
done something that might be punished by the stake. 
It was to counteract the pagan opinion, stated to be 
rapidly growing, that the Vatican Council forbade all 
clerics to lecture on the classics for five years. But in 
vain! A report of Paul Ill's cardinals charged pro- 
fessors of philosophy with teaching impiety. Indeed, 
the whole literature of contemporary Italy, from Ma- 
chiavelli, who treated Christianity as a false and nox- 
ious superstition, to Pulci who professed belief in 
nothing but pleasure, is saturated with free thought. 
** Vanity makes most humanists skeptics," wrote Ari- 
osto, ''why is it that learning and infidelity go hand in 
hand?" 
German In Germany, too, there was some free thought, the 

6 ep icb niost celebrated case being that of the ' ' godless painters 
of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham, Bartholomew 
Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed 
some doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bar- 
tholomew went further, asserting that baptism was a 
human device, that the Scriptures could not be be- 
lieved and that the preaching he had heard was but 
idle talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher 
himself; he recognized no superior authority but that 
of God. George Penz went further still, for while he 
admitted the existence of God he asserted that his na- 
ture was unknowable, and that he could believe neither 
in Christ nor in the Scriptures nor in the sacraments. 
The men were banished from the city. 
French jj^ prance, as in Italy, the opening of the century 

sIcCDtlCS 

saw signs of increasing skepticism in the frequent 



PHILOSOPHY 629 

trials of heretics who denied all Christian doctrines 
and **all principles save natural ones." But a spirit 
far more dangerous to religion than any mere denial 
incarnated itself in Rabelais. He did not philosophize, 
but he poured forth a torrent of the raw material from 
which philosophies are made. He did not argue or 
attack; he rose like a flood or a tide until men found 
themselves either swimming in the sea of mirth and 
mockery, or else swept off their feet by it. He studied 
law, theology and medicine; he travelled in Germany 
and Italy and he read the classics, the schoolmen, the 
humanists and the heretics. And he found everywhere 
that nature and life were good and nothing evil in the 
world save its deniers. To live according to nature 
he built, in his story, the abbey of Theleme, a sort of 
hedonist's or anarchist's Utopia where men and women 
dwell together under the rule, ''Do what thou wilt," 
and which has over its gates the punning invitation: 
"Cy entrez, vous, qui le saint evangile en sens agile 
annoncez, quoy qu'on gronde." For Rabelais there 
was nothing sacred, or even serious in ''revealed re- 
ligion," and God was "that intellectual sphere the cen- 
ter of which is everywhere and the circumference no- 
where. ' ' 

Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque 
the religious quarrels of the day. Bonaventure des 
Periers, in a work called Cijmhalum Mundi, introduced DesPeners, 
Luther under the anagram of Rethulus, a Catholic as 
Tryocan (i.e., Croyant) and a skeptic as Du Clenier 
{i.e., Incredule), debating their opinions in a way that 
redounded much to the advantage of the last named. 

Then there was Stephen Dolet the humanist pub- Doiet, 
lisher of Lyons, burned to death as an atheist, because, 
in translating the Axiochos, a dialogue tlioii atlributcd 
to Plato, he had written ' ' After death you will be noth- 
ing at all" instead of "After death you will be no 



630 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

more," as the original is literally to be construed. 
The charge was frivolous, but the impression was 
doubtless correct that he was a rather indifferent skep- 
tic, disdainful of religion. Ho, too, considered the 
Reformers only to reject them as too much like their 
enemies. No Christian church could hold the wor- 
shipper of Cicero and of letters, of glory and of hu- 
manity. And yet this sad and restless man, who found 
the taste of life as bitter as Rabelais had found it 
sweet, died for his faith. He was the martyr of the 
Renaissance. 
Bodin A more systematic examination of religion was made 

by Jean Bodin in his Colloquy on Secret and Sublime 
Matters, commonly called the Heptaplomeres. Though 
not published until long after the author's death, it had 
a brisk circulation in manuscript and won a reputation 
for impiety far beyond its deserts. It is simply a con- 
versation between a Jew, a Mohammedan, a Lutheran, 
a Zwinglian, a Catholic, an Epicurean and a Theist. 
The striking thing about it is the fairness with which 
all sides are presented; there is no summing up in 
favor of one faith rather than another. Nevertheless, 
the conclusion would force itself upon the reader that 
among so many religions there was little choice; that 
there was something true and something false in all; 
and that the only necessary articles were those on 
which all agreed. Bodin was half way between a theist 
and a deist ; he believed that the Decalogue was a nat- 
ural law imprinted in all men's hearts and that Ju- 
daism was the nearest to being a natural religion. He 
admitted, however, that the chain of casuality was 
broken by miracle and he believed in witchcraft. It 
cannot be thought that he was wholly without personal 
faith, like Machiavelli, and yet his strong argument 
against changing religion even if the new be better than 
the old, is entirely worldly. With France before his 



PHILOSOPHY 631 

eyes, it is not strange that he drew the general con- 
clusion that any change of religion is dangerous and 
sure to be followed by war, pestilence, famine and de- 
moniacal possession. 

After the fiery stimulants, compounded of brimstone Montaigne 
and Stygian hatred, offered by Calvin and the Cath- 
olics, and after the plethoric gorge of good cheer at 
Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's 
conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the 
fruit of the lotus. In him we find no blast and blaze 
of propaganda, no fulmination of bull and ban ; nor any 
tide of earth-encircling Rabelaisian mirth. His words 
fall as softly and as thick as snowflakes, and they leave 
his world a white page, with all vestiges of previous 
writings erased. He neither asseverates nor denies; 
he merely, as he puts it himself, "juggles," treating of 
idle subjects which he believes nothing at all, for he 
has noticed that as soon one denies the possibility of 
anything, someone else vnW say that he has seen it. In 
short, truth is a near neighbor to falsehood, and the 
wise man can only repeat, ''Que sais-jef" Let us live 
delicately and quietly, finding the w^orld worth enjoy- 
ing, but not worth troubling about. 

Wide as are the differences between the Greek 
thinker and the French, there is something Socratic 
in the way in which Montaigne takes up every subject 
only to suggest doubts of previously hold opinion about 
it. If he remained outwardly a Catholic, it was be- 
cause he saw exactly as much to doubt in other re- 
ligions. Almost all opinions, he urges, are taken on 
authority, for when men begin to reason they draw 
diametrically opposite conclusions from the same ob- 
served facts. He was in the civil wars esteemed an 
enemy by all parties, though it was only because he had 
both Huguenot and Catholic friends. "I have seen in 
Germany," he wrote, ''that Luther hath left as many 



632 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

divisions and altercations concerning the doubt of his 
opinions, yea, and more, than he himself moveth about 
the Holy Scriptures." The Reformers, in fact, had 
done nothing but reform superficial faults and had 
either left the essential ones untouched, or increased 
them. How foolish they were to imagine that the peo- 
ple could understand the Bible if they could only read 
it in their own language ! 
Montaigne was the first to feel the full significance 
ofsectV*^'^ of the multiplicity of sects. *'Is there any opinion so 
fantastical, or conceit so extravagant ... or opinion 
so strange," he asked, *^that custom hath not estab- 
lished and planted by laws in some region?" Usage 
sanctions every monstrosity, including incest and par- 
ricide in some places, and in others ^Hhat unsociable 
opinion of the mortality of the soul." Indeed, Mon- 
taigne comes back to the point, a man's belief does not 
depend on his reason, but on where he was born and 
how brought up. *'To an atheist all writings make 
for atheism." **We receive our religion but accord- 
ing to our fashion. . . . Another country, other testi- 
monies, equal promises, like menaces, might sembably 
imprint a clean contrary religion in us." 

Piously hoping that he has set down nothing re- 
pugnant to the prescriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic 
and Roman church, where he was bom and out of which 
he purposes not to die, Montaigne proceeds to demon- 
strate that God is unknowable. A man cannot grasp 
more than his hand will hold nor straddle more than 
his legs' length. Not only all religions, but all sci- 
entists give the lie to each other. Copernicus, having 
recently overthrown the old astronomy, may be later 
overthrown himself. In like manner the new medical 
science of Paracelsus contradicts the old and may in 
turn pass away. The same facts appear ditf erently to 
different men, and ''nothing comes to us but falsified 



PHILOSOPHY 633 

and altered by our senses." Probability is as hard to 
get as truth, for a man's mind is changed by illness, or 
even by time, and by his wishes. Even skepticism is 
uncertain, for ''when the Pyrrhonians sa}^, 'I doubt,' 
you have them fast by the throat to make them avow 
that at least you are assured and know that they 
doubt." In short, "nothing is certain but uncer- 
tainty," and "nothing seemeth true that may not 
seem false. " Montaigne wrote of pleasure as the chief 
end of man, and of death as annihilation. The glory 
of philosophy is to teach men to despise death. One 
should do so by remembering that it is as great folly to 
weep because one would not be alive a hundred years 
hence as it would be to weep because one had not been 
living a hundred years ago. 

A disciple who dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Charron, 
Montaigne was Peter Charron. He, too, played off the I54i-1603 
contradictions of the sects against each other. All 
claim inspiration and who can tell which inspiration is 
right? Can the same Spirit tell the Catholic that the 
books of Maccabees are canonical and tell Luther tliat 
they are not? The senses are fallible and the soul, 
located by Charron in a ventricle of the brain, is sub- 
ject to strange disturbances. Many things almost uni- 
versally believed, like immortality^ cannot be proved. 
Man is like the lower animals. "We believe, judge, 
act, live and die on faith," but this faith is j^oorly sup- 
ported, for all religions and all authorities are but of 
human origin. 

English thought followed rather than led that of English 
Europe throughout the century. At first tolerant and 
liberal, it became violently religious towards the mid- 
dle of the period and then underwent a strong re- 
action in the direction of indifference and atheism. 
For the first years, before the Reformation, the Utopia 
may serv^e as an example. More, under the influencQ 



634 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

of the Italian Platonists, pictured his ideal people as 
adherents of a deistic, humanitarian religion, with few 
priests and holy, tolerant of everj^thing save intol- 
erance. They worshipped one God, believed in im- 
mortality and yet thought that 'Hhe chief felicity of 
man ' ' lay in the pursuit of rational pleasure. Whether 
More depicted this cult simply to fulfil the dramatic 
probabilities and to show what Avas natural religion 
among men before revelation came to them, or" whether 
his own opinions altered in later life, it is certain that 
he became robustly Catholic. He spent much time in 
religious controversy and resorted to austerities. In 
one place he tells of a lewd gallant who asked a friar 
why he gave himself the pain of walking barefoot. 
Answered that this pain was less than hell, the gallant 
replied, '*If there be no hell, what a fool are you," and 
received the retort, ''If there be hell, what a fool are 
you. ' ' Sir Thomas evidently believed there was a hell, 
or preferred to take no chances. In one place he 
argues at length that many and great miracles daily 
take place at shrines. 

The feverish crisis of the Reformation was followed 
in the reign of Elizabeth by an epidemic of skepticism. 
Widely as it was spread there can be found little phil- 
osophical thought in it. It was simply the pendulum 
pulled far to the right swinging back again to the ex- 
treme left. The suspicions expressed that the queen 
herself was an atheist were unfounded, but it is impos- 
sible to dismiss as easily the numerous testimonies of 
infidelity among her subjects. Roger Ascham wrote in 
1563 his Schoolmaster that the ''incarnate devils" of Eng- 

lishmen returned from Italy said "there is no God" 
and then, "they first lustily condemn God, then scorn- 
fully mock his Word . . . counting as fables the holy 
mysteries of religion. They make Christ and his Gos- 
pel only serve civil policies. . . . They boldly laugh 



PHILOSOPHY 635 

to scorn both Protestant and Papist. They confess no 
Scripture. . . . They mock the pope; they rail on Lu- 
ther. . . . They are Epicures in living and aOtoi. in doc- 
trine." 

In like manner Cecil wrote : ' ' The service of God and 1569 
the sincere profession of Christianity are much de- 
cayed, and in place of it, partly papistry, partly pagan- 
ism and irreligion have crept in. . . . Baptists, de- 
riders of religion, Epicureans and atheists are every- 
where. ' ' Ten years later John Lyly w^rote that ' ' there 
never were such sects among the heathens, such schisms 
among the Turks, such misbelief among infidels as is 
now among scholars. ' ' The same author wTote a dia- 
logue, EiipJiues mid Atheos, to convince skeptics, 
while from the pulpit the Puritan Henry Smith 
shot *' God's Arrow against atheists." According to 
Tliomas Nash (Pierce Penniless' s Supplication to ^^^2 
tlie Devil) atheists are now triumphing and rejoicing, 
scorning the Bible, proving that there were men be- 
fore Adam and even maintaining ^'that there are no 
divells." Marlowe and some of his associates were 
suspected of atheism. In 1595 John Baldwin, exam- 
ined before Star Chamber, ''questioned whether there 
were a God; if there were, how he should be known; 
if by his Word, who wrote the same, if the prophets and 
the apostles, they w^ere but men and humanmn est 
errare." The next year Robert Fisher maintained be- 
fore the same court that ''Christ was no saviour and 
that the gospel was a fable." 

That one of the prime causes of all this skepticism Bacon 
was to be found in the religious revolution was the 
opinion of Francis Bacon. Although Bacon's philo- 
sophic thought is excluded from consideration by the 
chronological limits of this book, it may be permissible 
to quote his Avords on this subject. In one place he 
says that where 4;hcre are two religions contending for 



636 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

mastery their mutual animosity will add warmth to 
conviction and rather strengthen the adherents of each 
in their own opinions, but where there are more than 
two they will breed doubt. In another place he says : 

Heresies and schisms are of all others the greatest scan- 
dals, yea more than corruption of manners. ... So that 
nothing doth so keep men out of the church and drive 
men out of the church as breach of unity. . . . The doc- 
tor of the gentiles saith, "If an heathen come in and hear 
^•ou speak with several tongues, will he not say that you 
are mad?" And certainly it is little better when atheists 
and profane persons hear of so many discordant and 
contrary opinions in religion. 

But while Bacon saw that w^hen doctors disagree the 
common man will lose all faith in them, it was not to 
religion but to science that he looked for the reforma- 
tion of philosophy. Theology, in Bacon's judgment, 
Avas a chief enemy to philosophy, for it seduced men 
from scientific pursuit of truth to the service of dogma. 
''You may find all access to any species of philos- 
ophy," said Bacon, "however pure, intercepted by 
the ignorance of divines." 

The thought here expressed but sums up the actual 
trend of the sixteenth century in the direction of sep- 
arating philosophy and religion. In modern times the 
philosopher has found his inspiration far more in sci- 
ence than in religion, and the turning-point came about 
the time of, and largely as a consequence of, the new 
observation of nature, and particularly the new astron- 
omy. 
Revolt Tj-^g prologue to the drama of the new thought was 

Aristotle the rcvolt against Aristotle. "The master of them 
who know" had become, after the definite acceptance 
of his works as standard texts in the universities of the 
thirteenth century, an inspired and infallible authority 



PHILOSOPHY 



637 



for all science. With him were associated the school- 
men who debated the question of realism versus nom- 
inalism. But as the mind of man grew and advanced, 
what had been once the brace became a galling bond. 
All parties united to make common cause against the 
Stagyrite. The Italian Platonists attacked him in the 
name of their, and his, master. Luther opined that 
no one had ever understood Aristotle's meaning, that 
the ethics of that "damned heathen" directly contra- 
dicted Christian virtue, that any potter would know 
more of natural science than he, and that it would be 
well if he who had started the debate on realism and 
nominalism had never been born. Catholics like 
Usingen protested at the excessive reverence given to 
Aristotle at the expense of Christ. Finally, the French 
scientist Peter Ramus advanced the thesis at the Uni- 
versity of Paris that everything taught by Aristotle 
was false. No authority, he argued, is superior to rea- 
son, for it is reason which creates and determines au- 
thority. 

In place of Aristotle men turned to nature. ' ' Who- 
soever in discussion adduces authority uses not intel- 
lect but memory," said Leonardo. Vives urged that 
experiment was the only road to truth. The discov- 
eries of natural laws led to a new conception of ex- 
ternal reality, independent of man's wishes and ego- 
centric theories. It also gave rise to the conception of 
uniformity of law. Copernicus sought and found a 
mathematical unity in the heavens. It was, above all 
else, his astronomy that fought the battle of, and won 
the victory for, the new principles of research. Its 
glory was not so much its positive addition to knowl- 
edge, great as that was, but its mode of thought. By 
pure reason a new system was established and tri- 
umphed over the testimony of the senses and of all 



Ramu3, 
c. 1515-72 



EiTect of 
science on 
philosophy 



G38 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

previous authority, even that which purported to be 
revelation. Man was reduced to a creature of law; 
God was defined as an expression of law. 

How much was man's imagination touched, how 
was his whole thought and purpose changed by the 
Copemican discovery! No longer lord of a little, 
bounded world, man crept as a parasite on a grain of 
dust spinning eternally through endless space. And 
with the' humiliation came a great exaltation. For this 
tiny creature could now seal the stars and bind the 
Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun. 
What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of 
soul was not his ! To Copernicus belongs properly the 
praise lavished by Lucretius on Epicurus, of having 
burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having 
made man equal to heaven. The history of the past, 
the religion of the present, the science of the future — 
all ideas were transmuted, all values reversed by this 
new and wonderful hypothesis. 

But -all this, of course, was but dimly sensed by the 
contemporaries of Copernicus. What they really felt 
was the new compulsion of natural law and the neces- 
sity of causation. Leonardo was led thus far by his 
study of mathematics, which he regarded as the key to 
natural science. He even went so far as to define time 
as a sort of non-geometrical space. 
Theory of Two things were necessary to a philosophy in har- 
knowiedge -^q-^j ^yith the scientific view ; the first was a new the- 
ory of knowledge, the second was a new conception of 
the ultimate reality in the universe. Paracelsus con- 
tributed to the first in the direction of modern em- 
piricism, by defending understanding as that which 
comprehended exactly the thing that the hand touched 
and the eyes saw. Several immature attempts were 
made at scientific skepticism. That of Cornelius 
Agrippa — De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et 



PHILOSOPHY 639 

artium atque excellentia Verhi Dei declaynatio — can 
hardly be taken seriously, as it was regarded by the 
author himself rather as a clever paradox. Francis 
Sanchez, on the other hand, formulated a tenable the- 
ory of the impossibility of knowing anything. A riper 
theory of perception, following Paracelsus and antici- 
pating Leibnitz, was that of Edward Digby, based on 
the notion of the active correspondence between mind 
and matter. 

To the thinker of the sixteenth century the solution Theuiti- 
of the question of the ultimate reality seemed to de- ""^^^^^^^y 
mand some form of identification of the world-soul 
with matter. Paracelsus and Gilbert both felt in the 
direction of hylozoism, or the theory of the animation 
of all things. If logically carried out, as it was not 
by them, this would have meant that everything was 
God. The other alternative, that God was everything, 
was developed by a remarkable man, who felt for the 
new science the enthusiasm of a religious convert, 
Giordano Bruno. 

Bom at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth Bruno, 
year the Dominican friary. This step he soon re- 
gretted, and, after being disciplined for disobedience, 
fled, first to Eome and then to Geneva. Thence he 
wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg 1569 
and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including 
Oxford. In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was im- 
prisoned by the Inquisition, and after long years was !^5^5"qJ^ 
finally burnt at the stake in Kome. 

In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. 
At Wittenberg he spoke of Luther as '^a second Her- 
cules who bound the three-headed and triply-cro^vned 
hound of hell and forced him to vomit forth his poi- 
son." But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Re- 
formers as more ignorant than himself. His Expul- 
sion of the Triuinphant Beast, in the disguise of an at- 



640 MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 

tack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an assault 
on revealed religion. His treatise On the Heroic Pas- 
sions aims to show that moral virtues are not founded 
on religion but on reason. 
The new The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he 

asronomy ^^^^ ^^ almost bouudlcss measure for the new astron- 
omy, "by which," as he himself wrote, **we are moved 
to discover the infinite cause of an infinite effect, and 
are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside, 
apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as 
deity is situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us 
as we can be to ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa 
Bruno had learned that God may be found in the small- 
est as in the greatest things in the world; the smallest 
being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in 
energy, and all being united in the ''Monad," or ''the 
One." Now, Bruno's philosophy is noJiling but the 
cosmological implication and the metaphysical justi- 
fication of the Copemician theory in the conceptual 
terms of Nicholas of Cusa. 

Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the 
senses, dazzled by the whirling maze of worlds without 
end scattered like blazing sparks throughout space, 
drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a 
paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to 
celebrate his new faith, the religion of science. The 
universe for him was composed of atoms, tiny "mi- 
nima" that admit no further division. Each one of 
these is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some 
higher unity until finally ' ' the monad of monads ' ' was 
found in God. But this was no tribal Jehovah, no 
personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle, 
nearly identical with Natural Law. 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

§ 1. TOLEKANCE AND INTOLERANCE 

Because religion has in the past protested its own 
intolerance the most loudly, it is commonly regarded 
as the field of persecution par excellence. This is so 
far from being the case that it is just in the field of 
religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard 
struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work 
in the vineyard had been forcibly hauled thither, 
whereas the other son, admitting his willingness to 
go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized 
countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by 
going bare-foot and long-liaired than b}' proclaiming 
novel religious views ; he would be in vastly more dan- 
ger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic 
doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational con- 
vention, than he would by declaring his agnosticism 
or atheism. The reason of this state of things is that 
in the field of religion a tremendous battle between 
opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as 
the result, and that the rationalists then succeeded in 
imposing on the two parties, convinced that neither 
could exterminate the other, respect for each other's 
rights. 

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seven- intolerance: 

® Catholics 

teenth centuries. Almost all religions and almost all 
statesmen were then equally intolerant when they had 
the power to be so. The Catholic church, with that 
superb consistency that no new light can alter, has 

641 



642 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

always asserted that the opinion that everyone should 
Freedom of have freedom of conscience was ''madness flowing 
conscience fj-om the most foul fountain of inditf erence. "^ Au- 
gustine believed that the church should "compel men 
to enter in" to the kingdom, by force. Aquinas argued 
that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have heard 
the truth a sin, and that ''heretics deserve not only to 
be excommunicated but to be put to death." One of 
Luther's propositions condemned by the bull Exsurge 
Domine was that it is against the will of the Holy 
Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote : 
"Who ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to 
slaughter heretics who were nothing else than here- 
tics?" the proposition was condemned, by the Sor- 
bonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of God and 
of man. The power of the pope to depose and punish 
heretical princes was asserted in the bull of February 
15, 1559. 

The theory of the Catholic church was put into in- 
stant practice ; the duty of persecution was carried out 
by the Holy Office, of which Lord Acton, though him- 
self a Catholic, has said : ^ 

The Inquisition is pecuharly the weapon and peculiarly 
the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things 
in which they co-operated, followed or assented, as the 
distinctive feature of papal Rome. ... It is the prin- 
cipal thing with which the papacy is identified and by 
which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisi- 
tion is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is 
regulated and determined by his opinion about religious 
assassination. 

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not 
the judgment of the church. A prelate of the papal 

1 Gregory XVI, Encyclical, Mi/rari vos, 1832. 

2 Letters to Mary Gladstone, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p. 298f. 



TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE 643 

household published in 1895, the following words in 
the Annales ecclesiastici : ^ 

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils 
and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Mid- 
dle Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberahsm that 
bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little 
reasons to defend the Inquisition ! Let no one speak of 
the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the 
church needed excuses. blessed flames of those pyres 
by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons 
were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes 
of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and eter- 
nal damnation! noble and venerable memory of Tor- 
quemada ! 

So much for the Catholics. If any one still harbors Protestants 
the traditional prejudice that the early Protestants 
were more liberal, he must be undeceived. Save for a 
few splendid sayings of Luther, confined to the early Luther 
years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything 
to be found among the leading reformers in favor of 
freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power • 
to persecute they did. 

In his first period Luther expressed the theory of 
toleration as well as anyone can. He wrote: ''The 
pope is no judge of matters pertaining to God's Word 
and the faith, but a Christian must examine and judge 
them himself, as he must live and die by them." 
Again he said: "Heresy can never be prevented by 
force. . . . Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be 
cut with iron nor burnt with fire nor drowned in wa- 
ter." And yet again, "Faith is free. What could a 
heresy trial do? No more than make people agree by 
mouth or in writing; it could not compel the heart. 
For true is the proverb: 'Thoughts are free of taxes.' " 

iC. Mirbt: Quellen zur Gesohichte des rapattums, 3, 1911, p. 390. 



644 



THE TEMPEK OF THE TIMES 



February 
26, 1527 



Melanch- 
thon 



Even when the Anabaptists began to preach doctrines 
that he thoroughly disliked, Luther at first advised the 
government to leave them unmolested to teach and be- 
lieve what they liked, ''be it gospel or lies." 

But alas for the inconsistency of human nature! 
"When Luther's party ripened into success, he saw 
things quite differently. The first impulse came from 
the civil magistrate, whom the theologians at first en- 
dured, then justified and finally urged on. All persons 
save priests were forbidden by the Elector John of 
Saxony to preach or baptize, a measure aimed at the 
Anabaptists. In the same year, under this law, twelve 
men and one woman were put to death, and such exe- 
cutions were repeated several times in the following 
years, e. g. in 1530, 1532 and 1538. In the year 1529 
came the terrible imperial law, passed by an alliance 
of Catholics and Lutherans at the Diet of Spires, con- 
demning all Anabaptists to death, and interpreted to 
cover cases of simple heresy in which no breath of 
sedition mingled. A regular inquisition was set up in 
Saxony, with Melanchthon on the bench, and under it 
many persons were punished, some with death, some 
with life imprisonment, and some with exile. 

^Vhile Luther took no active part in these proceed- 
ings, and on several occasions gave the opinion that 
exile was the only proper punishment, he also, at 
other times, justified persecution on the ground that 
he was suppressing not heresy but blasphemy. As he 
interpreted blasphemy, in a work published about 1530, 
it included the papal mass, the denial of the divinity 
of Christ or of any other ''manifest article of the faith, 
clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout 
Christendom." The government should also, in his 
opinion, put to death those who preached sedition, an- 
archy or the abolition of private property. 

Melanchthon was far more active in the pursuit of 



TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE 6^5 



heretics than was his older friend. He reckoned the 
denial of infant baptism, or of original sin, and the 
opinion that the eucharistic bread did not contain the 
real body and blood of Christ, as blasphemy properly 
punishable by death. He blamed Brenz for his tol- 
erance, asking why we should pity heretics more than 
does God, who sends them to eternal torment? Brenz 
was convinced by this argument and became a perse- 
cutor himself. 

The Strassburgers, who tried to take a position in- 
termediate between Lutherans and Zwinglians, were as 
intolerant as any one else. They put to death a man 
for saying that Christ was a mere man and a false 
prophet, and then defended this act in a long mani- 
festo asking whether all religious customs of antiquity, 
such as the violation of women, be tolerated, and, if not, 
why they should draw the line at those who aimed not 
at the physical dishonor, but at the eternal damnation, 
of their wives and daughters? 

The Swiss also punished for heresy. Felix Manz 
was put to death by dro^vning, the method of punish- 
ment chosen as a practical satire on his doctrine of 
baptism of adults by immersion. At the same time 
George Blaurock was cruelly beaten and banished un- 
der threat of death. Zurich, Berne and St. Gall pub- 
lished a joint edict condemning Anabaptists to death, 
and under this law two Anabaptists were sentenced in 
1528 and two more in 1532. 

In judicially murdering Servetus the Genevans were 
absolutely consistent with Calvin's theory. In the 
preface to the Institutes he admitted the right of the 
government to put heretics to death and only argued 
that Protestants were not heretics. Grounding him- 
self on the law of Moses, he said that the death decreed 
by God to idolatry in the Old Testament was a uni- 
versal law binding on Christians. He thought that 



Bucer and 
Capilo 



Zwingli 
January 5, 
1527 



September 
9, 1527 



Calvin 



646 



THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 



Tolerance 



Erasmus 



Christians should hate the enemies of God as much as 
did David, and when Renee of Ferrara suggested that 
that law might have been abrogated by the new dis- 
pensation, Calvin retorted that any such gloss on a 
plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin 
went further, and when Castellio argued that heretics 
should not be punished with death, Calvin said that 
those who defended heretics in this manner were 
equally culpable and should be equally punished. 

Given the premises of the theologians, their argu- 
ments were unanswerable. Of late the opinion has 
prevailed that his faith cannot be wrong whose life 
is in the right. But then it was believed that the creed 
was the all-important thing; that God would send to 
hell those who entertained wrong notions of his scheme 
af salvation. ''We utterly abhor," says the Scots' 
Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those that af- 
firm that men who live according to equity and justice 
shall be saved, what religion so ever they have pro- 
fessed." 

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ven- 
tured to protest in the name of their master. In gen- 
eral, the persecuted sects, Anabaptists and Unitarians, 
were firmly for tolerance, by which their oAvn position 
would have been improved. Erasmus was thoroughly 
tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise 
specially devoted to the subject, uttered many obiter 
dicta in favor of mercy and wrote many letters to the 
great ones of the earth interceding for the oppressed. 
His broad sympathies, his classical tastes, his horror 
of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not have 
permitted him to resort to the coarse arms of rack 
and stake even against infidels and Turks. 

The noblest plea for tolerance from the Christian 
standpoint was that written by Sebastian Castellio as 
a protest against the execution of Servetus. He col- 



TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE 647 

lects all the authorities ancient and modem, the latter Castellio 
including Luther and Erasmus and even some words, 
inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by Calvin 
himself. ''The more one knows of the truth the less 
one is inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely 
observes, and yet, "there is no sect which does not 
condemn all others and wish to reign alone. Thence 
come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments, burn- 
ings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture anU 
torment that is plied every day because of some opin- 
ions not pleasing to the government, or even because of 
things unknown." But Christians burn not only in- 
fidels but even each other, for the heretic calls on the 
name of Christ as he perishes in agony. 

"Who would not think that Christ were Moloch, or some 
such god, if he wished that men be immolated to him and 
burnt alive? . . . Imap'ine that Christ, the judge of all, 
were present and himself pronounced sentence and lit 
the fire, — ^who would not take Christ for Satan? For 
what else would Satan do than burn those who call on 
the name of Christ? Christ, creator of the world, dost 
thou see such things? And hast thou become so totally 
different from what thou wast, so cruel and contrary to 
thyself? When thou wast on earth, there was no one 
gentler or more compassionate or more patient of in- 
juries. 

Calvin called upon his henchmen Beza to answer this 
"blasphemy" of one that must surely be "the chosen 
vessel of Satan." Beza replied to Castellio that God 
had given the sword to the magistrate not to be borne 
in vain and that it was better to have even a cruel 
tyrant than to allow everyone to do as he pleased. 
Those who forbid the punishment of heresy are, in 
Beza's opinion, despisers of God's Word and might as 
Avell say that even parricides should not be chastized. 
Two authors quoted in favor of tolerance more than 



648 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

More ^^^7 deserve to be are Sir Thomas More and Mon- 

taigne. In Utopia, indeed, there was no p'ersecution, 
save of the fanatic who wished to persecute others. 
But even in Utopia censure of the government by a pri- 
vate individual was punishable by death. And, twelve 
years after the publication of the Utopia, More came to 
argue ''that the burning of heretics is lawful and well 
done," and he did it himself accordingly. The reason 
he gave, in his Dialogue, was that heretics also perse- 
cute, and that it would put the -Catholics at an unfair 
disadvantage to allow heresy to wax unhindered until 
it grew great enough to crush them. There is some- 
thing in this argument. It is like that today used 
against disarmament, that any nation which started it 
would put itself at the mercy of its rivals. 

Montai e ^^^ spirit of Montaigne was thoroughly tolerant, 
because he was always able to see both sides of every- 
thing; one might even say that he was negatively sug- 
gestible, -and always saw the * ' other ' ' side of an opin- 
ion better than he saw his own side of it. He never 
came out strongly for toleration, but he made two ex- 
tremely sage remarks about it. The first was that it 
was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put 
men to death for their sake. The second was thus 
phrased, in the old English translation: ''It might be 
urged that to give factions the bridle to uphold their 
opinion, is by that facility and case, the ready way to 
mollify and»release them ; and to blunt the edge, which 
is sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty. ' ' 

Had the course of history been decided by weight of 
arg-ument, persecution would have been fastened on 
the world forever, for the consensus of opinion was 
overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience. But 
just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital 
question by argument, so the course of races and of 
civilizations is decided by factors lying deeper than 



TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE 649 

the logic of publicists can reach. Modem toleration 
developed from two very different sources; by one of 
which the whole point of view of the race has changed, 
and by the other of which a truce between warring 
factions, at first imposed as bitter necessity, has de- 
veloped, because of its proved value, into a permanent 
peace. 

The first cause of modem tolerance is the growing j^^j^^jg, 
rationalism of wiiich the seeds were sown by the Re- sance 
naissance. The generation before Luther saw an al- 
most unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned 
opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian 
ethics ; Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the 
soul ; More could frame a Utopia of deists, and Machi- 
avelli could treat religion as an instrument in the 
hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this 
liberty was admirable; but it was really narrow and 
''academic" in the worst sense of the word. The 
scholars who vindicated for themselves the right to say 
and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and 
in university halls, never dreamed that the people had 
the same rights. Even Erasmus was always urging 
Luther not to communicate imprudent truths to the 
vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so 
vexed that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted 
or boiled" for it. Erasmus's good friend Ammonius 
jocosely complained that heretics were so plentiful in 
England in 1511 before the Reformation had been 
heard of, that the demand for faggots to burn them 
was enhancing the price of fire-wood. Indeed, in this 
enlightened era of the Renaissance, what porridge was 
handed to the common people? What was free, ex- 
cept dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and 
Portugal and persecuted everywhere else! What tol- 
erance was extended to the Hussites? What mercy 
was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola? 



650 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

Reforma- Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has 

^^^"' been said of the intolerance of the Beformers, the 

; second cause that extended modern freedom of con- 
science from the privileged few to the masses, was 
the Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few 
years, all the glorious culture of the Renaissance with 
a dark mist of fanaticism, it nevertheless proved, con- 
trary to its own purpose, one of the two parents of 
liberty. What neither the common ground of the 
Christians in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of God, 
nor their enlightenment by the Spirit, could produce, 
was finally wrung from their mutual and bitter hatreds. 
Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark 
and noisome soil, that of religious liberty; sprouting 
from religious war has been the fairest. 

The steps were gradual. First, after the long dead- 
lock of Lutheran and Catholic, came to be worked out 

1555 the principle of the toleration of the two churches, em- 

bodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The Compact of 

1573 Warsaw granted absolute religious liberty to the 

nobles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with 
slaughter in the name of the faith, took a longer step 

1579 in the direction of toleration in the Union of Utrecht. 

The government of Elizabeth, acting from prudential 
motives only, created and maintained an extra-legal 
tolerance of Catholics, again and again refusing to 
molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The 
papists even hoped to obtain legal recognition when 
Francis Bacon proposed to tolerate all Christians ex- 
cept those who refused to fight a foreign enemy. 

1592 France found herself in a like position, and solved it 

by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the 
Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians 
for each other blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, 

1598 but after that lesson persecution on a large scale was 

at an end. Indeed, before its end, wide religious lib- 



WITCHCRAFT 651 

erty had been granted in some of the American colo- 
nies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland. 

§ 2. Witchcraft 

Some analogy to the wave of persecution and con- 
fessional war that swept over Europe at this time can 
be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were examples 
of those manias to which mankind is jjeriodically sub- 
ject. They run over the face of the earth like epidem- 
ics or as a great fire consumes a city. Beginning in 
a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to trace, 
the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maxi- 
mum fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it 
w^ere, dies away, often quite suddenly. Such manias 
were the Children's Crusade and the zeal of the flagel- 
lants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad 
speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the 
panics that repeatedly visit our markets. To the 
same category" belong the religious and superstitious 
delusions of the sixteenth century. 

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to 
trace than their causes. Certainly, reason does noth- 
ing to control them. In almost every case there are a 
few sane men to point out, with perfect rationalitj^ the 
nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all 
cases their words fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, 
imprisoned, sometimes put to death for their pains, 
whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame 
of current passion is listened to, rewarded and fol- 
lowed. 

The original stuff from which the mania Avas Ancient 
wrought is a savage survival. Hebrew and Roman 
law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the 
survival of magic, still called in Italy, ''the old re- 
ligion," and new superstitions added to it. Some- 
thing of the ancient enchantment still lies upon the 



magic 



652 THE TEMPEE OP THE TIMES 

fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one some- 
times comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as 
gnarled and twisted as the tortured souls that Dante 
imagined them to be. Who can wander through the 
heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with 
their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud 
and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not 
see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over 
their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are 
magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thur- 
ingian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine w^oods of 
Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the 
chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one 
can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the 
roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Wil- 
lows ^ and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling 
in the rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the 
calm of pools is so complete that it seems as if, accord- 
ing to Luther's words, the throwing of a stone into the 
water would raise a tempest. But on moonlit, windy, 
Walpurgis Night, witches audibly ride by, hooted at by 
the owls, and vast spectres dance in the cloud-banks 
beyond the Brocken. 
The witch The witch has become a typical figure : she was usu- 
ally a simple, old woman living in a lonely cottage with 
a black cat, gathering herbs by the light of the moon. 
But she was not always an ancient beldam; some 
witches were known as the purest and fairest maidens 
of the village ; some were ladies in high station ; some 
were men. A ground for suspicion was sometimes fur- 
nished by the fact that certain charletans playing upon 
the credulity of the ignorant, professed to be able by 
sorcery to find money, 'Ho provoke persons to love," 
or to consume the body and goods of a client's enemy. 
Black magic was occasionally resorted to to get rid 

1 Erlkonig. 



WITCHCRAFT 653 

of personal or political enemies. More often a wise 
woman would be sought for her skill in herbs and her 
very success in making cures would sometimes be her 
undoing. 

If the mtch was a domestic article in Europe, the ThedevU 
devil was an imported luxury from Asia. Like Aeneas 
and many another foreign conquerer, when he came to 
rule the land he married its princess — in this case 
Hulda the pristine goddess of love and beauty — and 
adopted many of the native customs. It is difiS- 
cult for us to imagine what a personage the devil 
was in the age of the Eeformation. Like all geniuses 
lie had a large capacity for work and paid great 
attention to detail. Frequently he took the form of 
a cat or a black dog with horns to frighten children 
by ''skipping to and fro and sitting upon the top of 
a nettle ' ' ; again he would obligingly hold a review of 
evil spirits for the satisfaction of Benvenuto Cellini's 
curiosity. He was at the bottom of all the earthquakes, 
pestilences, famines and wars of the century, and also, 
if we may tnist their mutual recriminations, he was the 
special patron of the pope on the one hand and of 
Calvin on the other. Luther often talked with him, 
though in doing so the sweat poured from his brow 
and his heart almost stopped beating. Luther ad- 
mitted that the devil always got the best of an argu- 
ment and could only be banished by some unprintably 
nasty epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satel- 
lites often took the form of men or women and under 
the name of incubi and succubi had sexual intercourse 
with mortals. One of the most abominable features 
of the witch craze was that during its height hundreds 
of children of four or five years old confessed to being 
the devil's paramours. 

So great was the power of Satan that, in the com- 
mon belief, many persons bartered their souls to him 



654 



THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 



Witches' 
Sabbath 



December 
5,1484 



in return for supernatural gifts in this life. To com- 
pensate them for the loss of their salvation, these per- 
sons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite 
to their neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, 
causing sickness to man and animals, making children 
cry themselves to death before baptism, rendering mar- 
riages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms 
to blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to 
compel love. 

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the 
celebration of blasphemous and obscene rites in an as- 
sembly known as the Witches' Sabbath. To enable 
themselves to ride to the meeting-place on broomsticks, 
the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a 
toad to it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of 
an infant, the powdered bones of a hanged man and cer- 
tain herbs. The meeting then indulged in a parody of 
the mass, for, so the grave doctors taught, as Christ 
had his sacraments the devil had his ^'unsacraments" 
or ''execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the 
form of a goat, dog, cat or ape and received the homage 
of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony. After a ban- 
quet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches 
followed. 

All this superstition smouldered along in the embers 
of folk tales for centuries until it was blo^vn into a 
devastating blaze by the breath of theologians who 
started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given 
by Innocence VIII in his bull Summis desiderantes. 
The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that 
many persons in Germany had had intercourse with 
demons and had by incantations hindered the birth of 
children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave au- 
thority to Henry Institoris and James Sprenger to cor- 
rect, incarcerate, punish and fine such persons, calling 
in, if need be, the aid of the secular arm. These gen- 



WITCHCEAFT 



655 



Mah'fica- 
ram, 1487 



tlcmcn acquitted themselves with unsurpassed zeal. 
Not content with trying and punishing people brought 
before them, they put forth The Witches' Hammer, Malleus 
called by Lea the most portentous monument of super- 
stition ever produced. In the next two centuries it was 
printed twenty-nine times. The University of Cologne 
at once decided that to doubt the reality of witchcraft 
was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other 
hand, having all it could do with Jews and heretics, 
treated witchcraft as a diabolical delusion. 

Though most men, including those whom we consider Inquisition 
the choice and master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and 
More, firmly believed in the objective reality of witch- 
craft, they were not obsessed by the subject, as were 
their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found 
for the intensification of the fanaticism. The first was 
the use of torture by the Inquisition. The crime was Torture 
of such a nature that it could hardly be proved save by 
confession, and this, in general, could be extracted only 
by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to note that 
in England where the spirit of the law was averse to 
torture, no progress in witch-hunting took place until 
a substitute for the rack had been found, first in prick- 
ing the body of the witch with pins to find the anaes- 
thetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in de- 
priving her of sleep. 

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and BibHoiatry 
the bibliolatry of Protestantism. The religious debate 
heated the spiritual atmosphere and turned men's 
thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continu- 
ally harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the in- 
junction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and 
the demoniacs of the New Testament, weighed heavily 
upon the shepherds of the people and upon their 
flocks. Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored 
not a doubt. The first use he made of the ban was to 



656 THE TEMPEE OF THE TIMES 

excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an idiotic 
child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recom- 
mended the authorities to drown it, as a body without 
a soul. Eepeatedly, both in private talk and in public 
sermons, he recommended that witches should be put to 
death without mercy and without regard to legal nice- 
ties. As a matter of fact, four witches were burned at 
Wittenberg on June 29, 1540. 

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad ex- 
ample of their master. In Geneva, under Calvin, 
thirty-four women were burned or quartered for the 
crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 
1562 was perhaps the occasion of a new English law 
against witchcraft. Kichard Baxter wrote on the Cer- 
tainty of a World of Spirits. At a much later time the 
bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John 
Wesley 's remark that giving up witchcraft meant giv- 
ing up the Bible. 
The mad- After the mania reached its height in the closing 

years of the century, anything, however trivial, would 
arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry, or a colt break 
its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a 
murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or 
else a physician, baflfled by some disease that did not 
yield to his treatment of bleeding and to his doses of 
garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that witchcraft 
was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any con- 
trariety met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he 
or she immediatel}^ thought of the black art, and con- 
sidered the most likely person for denunciation. This 
would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if 
she had a tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad 
luck to you!" on some previous occasion. She would 
then bo hauled before the court, promised liberty if she 
confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of 
Satan or to be sure that she was not hiding a charm 



ness 



WITCHCRAFT 657 

about her person. Torture in some form was then 
applied, and a ghastly list it was, pricking with needles 
under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow 
spurted out, wrenching of the head with knotted cords, 
toasting the feet before a fire, suspending the victim by 
the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop 
until the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work 
would be kept up until the poor woman either died un- 
der the torture, or confessed, when she was sentenced 
without mercy, usually to be bunied, sometimes to les- 
ser punishments. 

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, 
once accused, escaped. John Bodin, a man otherwise 
enlightened and learned, earned himself the not unjust 
name of ''Satan's attorney-general" by urging that 
strict proof could not be demanded by the very nature 
of these cases and that no suspected person should 
ever be released unless the malice of her accusers was 
plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, 
for each witch denounced accomplices until almost the 
whole population of certain districts was suspected. 
So frequently did they accuse their judges or their sov- 
ereign of having assisted at the witches' sabbath, that 
this came to be discounted as a regular trick of the 
devil. 

Persecution raged in some places, chiefly in Ger- 
many, like a visitation of pestilence or war. Those 
who tried to stop it fell victims to their own courage, 
and, unless they recanted, languished for years in 
prison, or were executed as possessed by devils them- 
selves. At Treves the persecution was encouraged by 
the cupidity of the magistrates who profited by con- 
fiscation of the property of those sentenced. At Bonn 
schoolboys of nine or ten, fair young maidens, many 
priests and scores of good women were done to death. 



Numbers 



No figures have been compiled for the total number executed 



658 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

of victims of this insanity. In England, under Eliza- 
beth, before the craze had more than well started on its 
career, 125 persons are known to have been tried for 
witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for 
the crime. In Venice the Inquisition punished 199 
persons for sorcery during the sixteenth century. In 
the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia, in 
1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of 
Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 
600, the bishop of Wtirzburg 900. About 800 were con- 
demned to death in a single batch by the Senate of 
Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Treves 
burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary 
crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect no- 
tion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The 
number of victims must be reckoned by the tens of 
thousands. 

Throughout the century there were not wanting 
some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an 

1518 epidemic of St. Vitus 's dance at Strassburg, the cit- 

izens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal 
vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural 
remedies should be used. Just as witches were becom- 
ing common in England, Gosson wrote in his School of 

1578 Abuse: ''Do not imitate those foolish patients, who, 

having sought all means of recovery and are never the 
nearer, run into witchcraft.'^ Leonardo da Vinci 
called belief in necromancy the most foolish of all hu- 
man delusions. 

As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at 
its height, the more honor must go to the few who 
wrote ex professo against it. The first of these, of any 

^^y^^ note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer. In 
his book De praestigiis daemonum he sought very cau- 

1563 tiously to show that the poor ' ' old, feeble-minded, stay- 



WITCHCRAFT G59 

at-home women ' ' sentenced for witchcraft were simply 
the victims of their own and other people's delusions. 
Satan has no commerce with them save to injure their 
minds and corrupt their imaginations. Quite differ- 
ent, he thought, were those infamous magicians who 
really used spells, charms, potions and the like, though 
even here Weyer did not admit that their effects were 
due to supernatural agency. This mild and cautious 
attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index 
and elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the 
author was a true servant of Satan. 

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the su- Scott 
perstition was Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witch- 
craft, wherein the lewd dealings of Witches and Witch- 
mongers is notably detected . . . whereunto is added a 
Treatise upon the Nature and Substance of Sinrits and 
Devils. Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 Eng- ^^^^ 
lish, on his subject, and he was under considerable 
obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he 
endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended 
witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He 
showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity 
of the charges on which poor old women were done to 
death. He explained the performance of the witch of 
Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic 
was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed 
out that all the phenomena might most easily be ex- 
plained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental 
disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one 
of staying the cruel persecution, with calculated par- 
tisanship he tried to lay the blame for it on the Catholic 
church. x\s the very existence of magic could not be 
disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked 
it on a priori grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies 
are in two categories, unable to act directly upon each 



660 THE TEMPEE OF THE TIMES 

other. Brilliant and convincing as the work was, it 
produced no corresponding effect. It was burned pub- 
licly by order of James I. 
Montaigne Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by any- 
thing, had the supreme art of rebutting others' opin- 
ions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless Bo- 
din's abominable Demonology that called forth his cele- 
brated essay on witchcraft, in which that subject is 
treated in the most modern spirit. The old presump- 
tion in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely 
from him ; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for 
Satan, who, with all his knowledge of the world, is 
easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion of witch- 
craft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott 
tried to kill it by heat ; he held it up to a fire of indigna- 
tion, and fairly boiled it in his scorching flame of rea- 
son. Montaigne tried the opposite treatment: refrig- 
eration. He attacked nothing ; he only asked, with an 
icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, 
as long as the mental passions could be kept at his own 
low temperature, there was no danger that the milk of 
human kindness should turn sour, no matter what vi- 
cious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by 
saying that he had seen various miracles in his own 
day, but, one reads between the lines, he doesn't be- 
lieve any of them. One error, he says, begets another, 
and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making 
converts to the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited 
all over France turned out to be a prank of young peo- 
ple counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a marvel, 
he should always say, ''perhaps." Better be appren- 
tices at sixty then doctors at ten. Now witches, he con- 
tinues, are the subject of the wildest and most foolish 
accusations. Bodin had proposed that they should be 
killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, ''To 
kill human beings there is required a bright-shining 



EDUCATION 661 

and clear light." And what do the stories amount to? 

How much more natural and more Hkely do I find it 
that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours 
should pass from east to west ? How much more natural 
that our understanding may by the voUibility of our 
loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than 
that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and 
bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a 
chimney? ... I deem it a matter pardonable not to be- 
lieve a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain 
away or break down the truth of the report in some way 
not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through 
the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me 
and to abate my incredulitj^, did me the grace in his own 
presence and in a particular place to make me see ten 
or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an 
old beldam vritch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by 
her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long be- 
fore was most famous in that profession. I saw both 
proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some in- 
sensible marks about this miserable old woman ; I enquired 
and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed 
and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away 
by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my con- 
science I should rather have appointed them hellebore 
than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime. 

Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we can- 
not get an explanation — and any explanation is more 
probable than magic — it is safe to disbelieve: ''Fear 
sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the vul- 
gar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin- 
good-fellows and such other bugbears and chimaeras." 
For Montaigne the evil spell upon the mind of the race 
liad been broken; alas! that it took so long for other 
men to throw it ot¥! 

§ 3. Education 

From the most terrible superstition let us turn to Education 
the noblest, most inspiring and most important work of 



662 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

humanity. With each generation the process of hand- 
ing on to posterity the full heritage of the race has be- 
come longer and more complex. 

Schools jt ^r^g^ therefore, upon a very definite and highly de- 

veloped course of instruction that the contemporary of 
Erasmus entered. There were a few great endowed 
schools, like Eton and "Winchester and Deventer, in 
which the small boy might begin to learn his ''gram- 
mar'^ — Latin, of course. Some of the buildings at 
Winchester and Eton are the same now as they were 
then, the quite beautiful chapel and dormitories of red 
brick at Eton, for example. Each of these two English 
schools had, at this time, less than 150 pupils, and but 
two masters, but the great Dutch school, Deventer, 
under the renowned tuition of Hegius, boasted 2200 
scholars, divided into eight forms. Many an old wood- 
cut shows us the pupils gathered around the master as 
thick as flies, sitting cross-legged on the floor, some in- 
tent on their books and others playing pranks, while 
there seldom fails to be one undergoing the chastise- 
ment so highly reconunended by Solomon. These great 
schools did not suffice for all would-be scholars. In 
many villages there was some poor priest or master 
who would teach the boys what he knew and prepare 
them thus for higher things. In some places there were 
tiny school-houses, much like those now seen in rural 
America. Such an one, renovated, may be still visited 
at Mansfeld, and its quaint inscription read over the 
door, to the eif ect that a good school is like the wooden 
horse of Troy. When the boys left home they lived 
more as they do now at college, being given a good deal 
of freedom out of hours. The poorer scholars used 
their free times to beg, for as many were supported in 
this way then as now are given scholarships and other 
charitable aids in our universities. 

Flogging Though there were a good many exceptions, most of 



EDUCATION 663 

the teachers were brutes. The profession was despised 
as a menial one and indeed, even so, many a gentleman 
took more care in the selection of grooms and game- 
keepers than he did in choosing the men with whom to 
entrust his children. Of many of the tutors the man- 
ners and morals were alike outrageous. They used 
filthy language to the boys, whipped them cruelly and 
habitually drank too much. They made the examina- 
tions, says one unfortunate pupil of such a master, like 
a trial for murder. The monitor employed to spy on 
the boys was known by the significant name of ''the 
wolf." Public opinion then approved of harsh meth- 
ods. Nicholas Udall, the talented head-master of Eton, 
was warmly commended for being "the best flogging 
teacher in England" — until he was removed for his 
immorality. 

The principal study — after the rudiments of reading Latin 
and writing the mother tongue were learned — was 
Latin. As, at the opening of the century, there were 
usually not enough books to go around, the pedagogue 
would dictate declensions and conjugations, with ap- 
jiropriate exercises, to his pupils. The books used 
were such as Donatus on the Parts of Speech, a poem 
called the Facetus by John of Garland, intended to give 
moral, theological and grammatical information all in 
one, and selecting as the proper vehicle rhymed coup- 
lets. Other manuals were the Floretus, a sort of ab- 
struse catechism, the Cornutus, a treatise on synonyms, 
and a dictionary in which the words were arranged not 
alphabetically but according to their supposed etymol- 
ogy — thus hirundo (swallow) from aer (air). One 
had to know the meaning of the word before one 
searched for it! The grammars were written in a 
barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can 
any man now readily understand the following defi- 
nition of "pronoun," taken from a book intended 



664 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

for beginners, published in 14991 ''Pronomen . . . 
significat substantiam sen entitatem sub modo con- 
ceptus intrinseco permanentis sen habitus et quietis 
sub determinatae apprehensionis f ormalitate. " 

That with all these handicaps boys learned Latin at 
all, and some boys learned it extremely well, must be 
attributed to the amount of time spent on the subject. 
For years it was practically all that was studied — for 
the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic 
reduced itself to this — and they not only read a great 
deal but wrote and spoke Latin. Finally, it became as 
easy and fluent to them as their own tongue. Many 
instances that sound like infant prodigies are known 
to us; boys who spoke Latin at seven and wTote elo- 
quent orations in it at fourteen, were not uncommon. 
It is true that the average boy spoke then rather a 
translation of his own language into Latin than the 
best idiom of Rome. The following ludicrous speci- 
•mens of conversation, throwing light on the manners 
as well as on the linguistic attainments of the students, 
were overheard in the University of Paris: ''Capis me 
pro uno alio"; "Quando ego veni de ludendo, ego bibi 
unum magnum vitrum totum plenum de vino, sine de- 
ponendo nasum de vitro"; "In prandendo non facit 
nisi lichare suos digitos. " 
Reforma- Though there was no radical reform in education 

during the century between Erasmus and Shakespeare, 
two strong tendencies may be discerned at work, one 
looking towards a milder method, the other towards 
the extension of elementary instruction to large classes 
hitherto left illiterate. The Reformation, which was 
rather poor in original thought, was at any rate a tre- 
mendous vulgarizer of the current culture. It was a 
popular movement in that it passed around to the peo- 
ple the ideas that had hitherto been the possession of 
the few. Its first effect, indeed, together with that of 



tion 



EDUCATION 665 

the tumults that accompanied it, was for the moment 
unfavorable to all sorts of learning. Not only wars 
and rebellions frightened the youth from school, but 
men arose, both in England and Germany, who taught 
that if God had vouchsafed his secrets to babes and 
sucklings, ignorance must be better than wisdom and 
that it was therefore folly to be learned. 

Luther not only turned the tide, but started it flowing Luther 
in that great wave that has finally given civilized lands 
free and compulsory education for all. In a Letter to 
the Aldermen and Cities of Germany on the Erec- 1524 
tion and Maintenance of Christian Schools he urged 
strongly the advantages of learning. "Good schools 
[he maintained] are the tree from which grow all good 
conduct in life, and if they decay great blindness must 
follow in religion and in all useful arts. . . . There- 
fore, all wise rulers have thought schools a great light 
in civil life." Even the heathen had seen that their 
children should be instructed in all liberal arts and sci- 
ences both to fit them for war and government and to 
give them personal culture. Luther several times sug- 
gested that ''the civil authorities ought to compel peo- 
ple to send their children to school. If the government 
can compel men to bear spear and arquebus, to man 
ramparts and perform other martial duties, how much 
more has it the right to compel them to send their chil- 
dren to school?" Eepeatedly he urged upon the many 
princes and burgomasters with whom he corresponded 
the duty of providing schools in ever)'' town and village. 
A portion of the ecclesiastical revenues confiscated by 
the German states was in fact applied to this end. 
Many other new schools were founded by princes and 
were known as ''Fiirstenschulen" or gymnasia. 

The same course was run in England. Colet's England 
foundation of St. Paul's School in London, for 153 i^io 
boys, has perhaps won an undue fame, for it was back- 



666 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

"ward in method and not important in any special way, 
but it is a sign that people at that time were turning 
their thoughts to the education of the young. When 
Edward VI mounted the throne the dissolution of the 
chantries had a very bad effect, for their funds had 
commonly supported scholars. A few years previ- 
ously Henry VIII had ordered ''every of you that be 
parsons, vicars, curates and also chantry priests and 
stipendiaries to . . . teach and bring up in learning 
the best you can all such children of your parishioners 
as shall come to you, or at least teach them to read 
English." Edward VI revived this law in ordering 
chantry priests to ''exercise themselves in teaching 
youth to read and write," and he also urged people to 
contribute to the maintenance of primary schools in 
each parish. He also endowed certain grammar 
schools with the revenues of the chantries. 

In Scotland the Booh of Discipline advocated com- 
pulsory education, children of the well-to-do at their 
parents' expense, poor children at that of the church. 
Jesuit jj^ Catholic countries, too, there was a passion for 

colleges 

founding new schools. Especially to be mentioned are 
the Jesuit "colleges," "of which," Bacon confesses, "I 
must say. Talis cum sis utinam noster esses.^^ How 
well frequented they were is shown by the following 
figures. The Jesuit school at Vienna had, in 1558, 500 
pupils, in Cologne, about the same time, 517, in Treves 
500, in Mayence 400, in Spires 453, in Munich 300. 
The method of the Jesuits became famous for its com- 
bined gentleness and art. They developed consum- 
mate skill in allowing their pupils as much of history, 
science and philosophy as they could imbibe without 
jeoparding their faith. From this point of view their 
instruction was an inoculation against free thought. 
But it must be allowed that their teaching of the 



EDUCATION 667 

classics was excellent. They followed the humanists' 
methods, but they adapted them to the purpose of the 
church. 

All this flood of new scholars had little that was new The 
to study. Neither Reformers nor humanists had any 
searching- or thorough revision to propose; all that 
they asked was that the old be taught better: the hu- 
manities more humaneh". Erasmus wrote much on ed- 
ucation, and, following him Vives and Bude and ]\Ie- 
lanchthon and Sir Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham; 
their programs, covering the whole period from the 
cradlo to the highest degree, seem thorough, but what 
does it all amount to, in the end, but Latin and Greek? 
Possibly a little arithmetic and geometry and even 
astronomy were admitted, but all was supposed to be 
imbibed as a by-product of literature, historj^ from 
Livy, for example, and natural science from Pliny. In- 
deed, it often seems as if the knowledge of things was 
valued chiefly for the sake of literary comprehension 
and allusion. 

The educational reformers differed little from one 
another save in such details as the best authors to read. 
Colet preferred Christian authors, such as Lactantius, 
Pnidentius and Baptista Mantuan. Erasmus thought 
it well to begin with the verses of Dionysius Cato, and 
to proceed through the standard authors of Greece and 
Rome. For the sake of making instruction easy and 
pleasant he wrote his Colloquies — in many respects his 
chef d' oeuvre if not the best Latin produced by any- 
one during the century. In this justly famous work, 
which was adopted and used by all parties immediately, 
he conveyed a considerable amount of liberal religi- 
ous and moral instruction with enough wit to make it 
palatable. Luther, on ^felanchthon's advice, notwith- 
standing his hatred for the author, urged the use of the 



668 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

Colloquies in Protestant schools, and they were like- 
1548 wise among the books permitted by the Imperial man- 

date issued at Louvain. 

The method of learning language was for the in- 
stmctor to interpret a passage to the class which they 
were expected to be able to translate the next day. 
Ascham recommended that, when the child had writ- 
ten a translation he should, after a suitable interval, 
be required to retranslate his own English into Latin. 
Writing, particularly of letters, was tauglit. The real 
advance over the medieval curriculum was in the teach- 
.ing of Greek — to which the exceptionally ambitious 
school at Geneva added, after 1538, Hebrew. Save 
for this and the banishment of scholastic barbarism, 
there was no attempt to bring in the new sciences and 
arts. For nearly four hundred years the curriculum 
of Erasmus has remained the foundation of our educa- 
tion. Only in our o^vn times are Latin and Greek 
giving way, as the staples of mental training, to mod- 
ern languages and science. In those days modem lan- 
guages were picked up, as Milton was later to recom- 
mend that they should be, not as part of the regular 
course, but *'in some leisure hour," like music or 
dancing. Notwithstanding such exceptions as Edward 
VI and Elizabeth, who spoke French and Italian, there 
were comparatively few scholars who knew any living 
tongue save their own. 
University AVhcu the youth wcut to the university he found 
^^^^ little change in either his manner of life or in his stud- 

ies. A number of boys matriculated at the age of 
thirteen or fourteen; on the other hand there was a 
sprinkling of mature students. The extreme youth of 
many scholars made it natural that they should be un- 
der somewhat stricter discipline than is now the case. 
Even in the early history of Harvard it is recorded 
that the president once *' flogged four bachelors" for 



EDUCATION 669 

being out too late at night. At colleges like ^lontaigu, 
if one may believe Erasmus, the path of learning was 
indeed thorny. What between the wretched diet, the 
filth, the cold, the crowding, ''the short-winged hawks" 
that the students combed from their hair or shook 
from their shirts, it is no wonder that many of them 
fell ill. Gaming, fighting, drinking and wenching were 
common. 

Nominally, the university was then under the entire Mode of 
control of the faculty, who elected one of themselves g^^^^^^^"* 
''rector" (president) for a single year, who appointed 
their own members and who had complete charge of 
studies and discipline, save that the students occasion- 
ally asserted their ancient rights. In fact, the cor- 
poration was pretty well under the thumb of the gov- 
ernment, which compelled elections and dismissals 
when it saw fit, and occasionally appointed commis- 
sions to visit and reform the faculties. 

Instruction was still carried on by the old method ofinstruc- 
of lectures and debates. These latter were sometimes 
on important questions of the day, theological or po- 
litical, but were often, also, nothing but displays of 
ingenuity. There Avas a great lack of laboratories, a 
need that just began to be felt at the end of the cen- 
tury w^hen Bacon wrote: "Unto the deep, fruitful 
and operative study of many sciences, specially nat- 
ural philosophy and physics, books be not only the 
instrumentals." Bacon's further complaint that, 
''among so many great foundations of colleges in Eu- 
rope, I find it strange that they are all dedicated to 
professions, and none left free to arts and sciences 
at large," is an early hint of the need of the endow- 
ment of research. The degrees in liberal arts, B.A. 
and ^r.A., were then more strictly than now licences 
either to teach or to pursue higher professional studies 
in divinity, law, or medicine. Fees for graduation 



670 



THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 



New 
universities 



Numbers 



were heavy; in France a B.A. cost $24, an M.D. $690 
and a D.D. $780. 

Germany then held the primacy that she has ever 
since had in Europe both in the number of her uni- 
versities and in the aggregate of her students. The 
new universities founded by the Protestants were: 
Marburg 1527, Konigsberg 1544, Jena 1548 and again 
1558, HehTistadt 1575, Altdorf 1578, Paderborn 1584. 
In addition to these the Catholics founded four or five 
new universities, though not important ones. They 
concentrated their efforts on the endeavor to found 
new ''colleges" at the old institutions. 

In general the universities lost during the first years 
of the Reformation, but more than made up their num- 
bers by the middle of the century. Wittenberg had 
245 matriculations in 1521; in 1526 the matriculations 
had fallen to 175, but by 1550, notwithstanding the re- 
cent Schmalkaldic War, the total numbers had risen 
to 2000, and this number was well maintained through- 
out the century. 

Erfurt, remaining Catholic in a Protestant region, 
declined more rapidly and permanently. In the year 
1520-21 there were 311 matriculations, in the follow- 
ing year 120, in the next year 72, and five years later 
only 14. Between 1521 to 1530 the number of students 
fell at Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfort-on-the 
Oder from 73 to 32. Rostock, however, recovered 
after a reorganization in 1532. The number of stu- 
dents at Greif swald declined so that no lectures were 
given during the period 1527-39, after which it again 
began to pick up. Konigsberg, starting with 314 stu- 
dents later fell off. Cologne declined in numbers, and 
so did Maj^ence until the Jesuits founded their college 
in 1561, which, by 1568, had 500 pupils recognized 
as members of the university. Vienna, also, having 
sunk to the number of 12 students in 1532, kept at a 



univer- 
sities 



EDUCATION 671 

very low ebb rntil 1554, when the effects of the Jesuit 
revival were felt. Whereas, during the fifteen years 
1508-22 there were 6485 matriculations at Leipzig, 
during the next fifteen years there were only 1935. By 
the end of the century, however, Leipzig had again 
become, under Protestant leadership, a large institu- 
tion. 

Two new universities were founded in the British British 
Isles during the century, Edinburgh in 1582 and Trin- 
ity College, Dublin, in 1591. In England a number of 
colleges were added to those already existing at Ox- 
ford and Cambridge, namely Christ Church (first 
knoAvn, after its founder, Wolsey, as Cardinal's Col- 
lege, then as King's College), Brasenose, and Corpus 
Christi at Oxford and St. John's, Magdalen, and Trin- 
ity at Cambridge. Notwithstanding these new foun- 
dations the number of students sank. During the 
years 1542-8, only 191 degrees of B.A. were given at 
Cambridge and only 172 at Oxford. Ascham is au- 
thority for the statement that things were still worse 
under ]\Iary, when ' * the wild boar of the wood ' ' either 
'*cut up by the root or trod dowTi to the ground" the 
institutions of learning. The revenues of the univer- 
sities reached their low-water mark about 1547, when 
the total income of Oxford from land was reckoned at 
£5 and that of Cambridge at £50, per annum. Under 
Elizabeth, the universities rose in numbers, while bet- 
ter Latin and Greek were taught. It was at this time 
that a college education became fashionable for young 
gentlemen instead of being exclusively patronized by 
"learned clerks." The foundation of the College of 1528 
Physicians in London deserves to be mentioned. 

A university was founded at Zurich under the influ- 
ence of Zwingli. Geneva's University opened in 1559 
with Beza as rector. Connected with it was a prepara- 
tory school of seven forms, with a rigidly prescribed 



672 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

course in the classics. "When the boy was admitted 
to the university proper by examination, he took what 
he chose; there was not even a division into classes. 
The courses offered to him included Greek, Hebrew, 
theology, dialectic, rhetoric, physics and mathematics. 
French The foundation of the College de France by Francis 

sities I represented an attempt to bring new life and vigor 

into learning by a free association of learned men. It 
was planned to emancipate science from the tutelage 
of theology. Erasmus was invited but, on his refusal 
to accept, Bude was given the leading position. Chairs 
of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and Latin were founded 
by the king in 1530. Other institutions of learning 
founded in France were Eheims 1547, Douai 1562, Be- 
san^on ^ 1564, none of them now in existence. Paris 
continued to be the largest university in the world, 
with an average number of students of about 6000. 

Louvain, in the Netherlands, had 3000 students in 
1500 and 1521; in 1550 the number rose to 5000. It 
was divided into colleges on the plan still found in 
England. Each college had a president, three pro- 
fessors and twelve fellows, entertained gratis, in addi- 
tion to a larger number of paying scholars. The most 
popular classes often reached the number of 300. The 
foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's 
friend Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its 
name indicates, to give instruction in Greek and He- 
brew as well as in the Latin classics. A blight fell 
upon the noble institution during the wars of religion. 
Under the supervision of Alva it founded professor- 
ships of catechetics and substituted the decrees of the 
Council of Trent for the Decretum of Gratian in the 
law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused by 
the Religious War and starved by the Lenten diet of 
Spanish Catholicism, it gradually decayed, while its 

1 Beeancon was then an Imperial Free City. 



EDUCATION 673 

place was taken in the eyes of Europe by the Protestant ^^'^^ 
University of Leyden. A second Protestant founda- i^^^ 
tion, Franeker, for a time flourished, but finally with- 
ered away. 

Spanish universities were crowded with new num- 
bers. The maximum student body was reached by 
Salamanca in 1584 w^ith 6778 men, while Alcala passed 
in zenith in 1547 with the respectable enrollment of 
1949. The foundation of no less than nine new uni- 
versities in Spain bears witness to the interest of the 
Iberian Peninsula in education. 

Four new universities opened their doors in Italy 
during the year 1540-15G5. The Sapienza at Rome, 
in addition to these, was revived temporarily by Leo 
X in 1513, and, after a relapse to the dormant state, 
again awoke to its full power under Paul III, when 
chairs of Greek and Hebrew were established. 

The services of all these universities cannot be com- Contribu- 
putcd on any statistical method. Notwithstanding all p°oVress 
their faults, their dogmatic narrowness and their aca- 
demic arrogance, they contributed more to progress 
than any other institutions. Each academy became the 
center of scientific research and of intellectual life. 
Their influence was enormous. How much did it moan 
to that age to see its contending hosts marshalled un- 
der two professors, Luther and Adrian VI ! And how 
many other leaders taught in universities : — Erasmus, 
^Melanehthon, IJcuchlin, Lel'evre, to mention only a 
few. Pontiffs and kings sought for support in aca- 
demic pronouncements, nor could they always force 
the doctors to give the decision they wished. In fact, 
each university stood like an Acropolis in the republic 
of letters, at once a temple and a fortress for those 
who loved truth and ensued it. 



674 



THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 



Art the 
expression 
of an ideal 



Leonardo, 
1452-1519 



§ 4. Aet 

The significant thing about art, for the historian as 
for the average man, is the ideal it expresses. Tlie 
artist and critic may find more to interest him in the 
development of technique, how this painter dealt with 
perspective and that one with ''tactile values," how 
the Florentines excelled in drawing and the Venetians 
in color. But for us, not being professionals, the con- 
tent of the art is more important than its form. For, 
after all, the glorious cathedrals of the Middle Ages 
and the marvellous paintings of the Renaissance were 
not mere iridescent bubbles blown by or for children 
with nothing better to do. They were the embodiments 
of ideas ; as the people thought in their hearts so they 
projected themselves into the objects they created. 

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many 
others who would be greatest in any other time, were 
contemporaries of Luther. They had a gospel to 
preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it 
was the glad tidings of the kingdom of this world : the 
splendor, the loveliness, the wonder and the nobility 
of human life. When, with young eyes, they looked 
out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not 
the vale of tears that they had been told ; they found it 
a rapture. They saw the naked body not vile but beau- 
tiful. 

Leonardo da Vinci was ^a painter of wonder, but not 
of naive admiration of things seen. To him the mir- 
acle of the world was in the mystery of knowledge, — 
and he took all nature as his province. He gave his 
life and his soul for the mastery of science; he ob- 
served, he studied, he pondered everything. From 
the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, 
nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing 
too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experi- 
menting, he dug deep for the inner reality of things; 



ART 675 

he spent years drawing the internal organs of the body, 
and other years making plans for engineers. 

When he painted, there was but one thing that fasci- 
nated him : the soul. To lay bare the mind as he had 
dissected the brain; to take man or woman at some 
self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of 
X:)ersonality, all this was his passion, and in all this 
he excelled as no one had ever done, before or since. 
His battle picture is not some gorgeous and romantic 
cavalry charge, but a confused melee of horses snort- 
ing with terror, of men wild with the lust of battle or 
with hatred or with fear. His portraits are either cari- 
catures or prophecies : they lay bare some- trait unsus- 
pected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is not 
his portrait of himself a wizard! Does not his Medusa 
chill us with the horror of death? Is not Beatrice 
d'Este already doomed to waste away, when he paints 
her? 

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times The Last 
before him, now as a eucharistic sacrament, now as a ^^^^'^ 
monastic meal, now as a gathering of friends. What 
did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. 
Jesus has just said, ''One of you will betray me," and 
his divine head has sunk upon his breast with calm, 
inuTiortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick with 
sorrow; Peter would be fiercely at the traitor's throat; 
Thomas darts forward, doubting, to ask, ''Lord, is it 
I? " Every face expresses deep and different reaction. 
There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords of his neck 
standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort 
not to betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, 
lowers on his visage as plainly as a thunder cloud on 
a sultry afternoon. 

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an 
enigmatic smile that he had seen somewhere, perhaps 
in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of some 



676 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

woman he had known -as a boy. His first paintings 
were of laughing women, and the same smile is on the 
lips of John the Baptist and Dionysus and Leda and 
the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was 
he trying to express? Vasari found the ^' smile so 
pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human 
to behold ' ' ; Euskin thought it archaic, Miintz ' ' sad and 
disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neu- 
rotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, 
Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it ''the 
animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of 
the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imag- 
inary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of 
the Borgias. " Though some great critics, like Rei- 
nach, have asserted that Mona Lisa is only subtle as 
Mona Lisa any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to regard 
it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And 
what means the smile I In a word, sex, — not on the 
physical side so studied and glorified by other painters, 
but in its psychological aspect. For once Leonardo 
has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire, 
— the passion, the lust, the trembling and the shame. 
There is something frightening about Leda caught with 
the swan, about the effeminate Dionysus and John the 
Baptist's mouth ''folded for a kiss of irresistible 
pleasure. ' ' If the stories then told about the children 
of Alexander VI and about Margaret of Navarre and 
Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was their sister. 

Everything he touched acquires the same psycho- 
logical penetration. His Adoration of the Magi is 
not an effort to delight the eye, but is a study, almost 
a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are 
brought before the miraculous Babe, and their reac- 
tions, of wonder, of amazement, of devotion, of love, 
of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference, are per- 
fectly recorded. 



ART 677 

After the cool and stormy spring of art came the The 
warm and gentle summer. Life became so full, so ^"<^'*^"8 
beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men sought 
for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. 
Venice, seated like a lovely, wanton queen, on her 
throne of sparkling waters, drew to her bosom all 
the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her 
argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of 
vestment with which to array her body sumptuously; 
her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels and palaces 
and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in 
her great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and 
Titian and Tintoretto ! Life is no longer a wonder to 
them but a banquet; the malady of thought, the trou- 
ble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm 
of the senses, and if man could live by sense alone, 
surely he must revel in what they offer. They dye 
their canvasses in such blaze of color and light as can 
be seen onlj^ in the sunset or in the azure of the Med- 
iterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe 
their figures in every conceivable splendor of orphrey 
and ermine, in jewels and shining armor and rich 
stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow 
dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit 
of landscape an enchanted garden, every action an 
ecstasy, every man a hero and every woman a paragon 
of voluptuous beauty. 

The portrait is one of the most characteristic 
branches of Renaissance painting, for it appealed to 
the newly aroused individualism, the grandiose egotism 
of the so optimistic and so self-confident ago. After 
Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait pri- 
marily a character study. Titian and Raphael and 
Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought 
rather to please and flatter than to analyse. But "T';'/"' 

c 1490— 

withal there is often a truth to nature that make many 1575 



678 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment 
in their revelation of character. Titian's splendid 
harmonies of scarlet silk and crimson satin and gold 
brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine 
many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. 
What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the 
satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the 
bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dull- 
ness of his son; or than that strange combination of 
wolfish cunning and smnish bestiality with human 
thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's 
portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the 
other hand, what a profusion of strong and noble men 
and women gaze at us from the canvases of that 
time. They are a study of infinite variety and of sur- 
passing charm. 

The secularization of art proceeded even to the 
length of affecting religious painting. Susanna and 
Magdalen and St. Barbara and St. Sebastian are no 
longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless 
clothes ; they become maidens and youths of marvellous 
beauty. Even the Virgin and Christ were drawn from 
the handsomest models obtainable and were richly 
clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its con- 
summation in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino. 
Raphael, It is oue of thosc uscful Coincidences that seem al- 

1483-1520 j-QQg^ symbolic that Raphael and Luther were born in 
the same year, for they were both the products of the 
same process — the decay of Catholicism. When, for 
long ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may 
form a bed of coal, ready to be dug up and turned into 
power, or it may make a field luxuriant in grain and 
fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval re- 
ligion the miner's son of IMansfeld extracted enough 
energy to turn half Europe upside down; from the 
same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most exquisite 



ART 679 

blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change 
the metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Kaphael 
the rainbow of the same storm. 

The chief work of both of them was to make religion Religious 
understanded of the people; to adapt it to the needs ^^^ 
of the time. "When faith fails a man may either aban- 
don the old religion for another, or he may stop think- 
ing about dogma altogether and find solace in the 
mystical-aesthetic aspect of his cult. This second al- 
ternative was worked to its limit by Raphael. lie was 
not concerned with the true but with the beautiful. 
By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures 
have religious subjects. The whole Bible — which Lu- 
ther translated into the vernacular — was by him trans- 
lated into the yet clearer language of sense. Even 
now most people conceive biblical characters in the 
forms of this greatest of illustrators. Delicacy, 
pathos, spirituality, idyllic loveliness— everything but 
realism or tragedy — are stamped on all his canvases. 
''Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian 
proverb, and so skilfully selected a type of beauty is 
there in his Virgins that they are neither too ethereal 
nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at 
its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine 
^ladonna, "whose eyes are deeper than the depths of 
waters stilled at even." The simple mind, unsophisti- 
cated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship 
a Rapiiael when he will but revel in a Titian. 
Strangely touched by the magic of this passionate lover 
both of the church and of mortal women, the average 
man of that day, or of this, found, and will find, glad 
tidings for his heart in the very color of Mary's robe. 
"Whoever would know how Christ transfigured and 
made divine should be painted, must look," says Va- 
sari, on Raphael's canvases. 

The church and the papacy found an ally in Raphael, 



6S0 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

•whose pencil illustrated so many triumphs of the popes 
and so many mysteries of religion. In his Disputa (so- 
called) he made the secret of transubstantiation visible. 
In his great cartoon of Leo I turning back Attila he 
gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parnassus 
and School of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy 
for the people. Indeed, it is from them that he has 
reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of art 
pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallow- 
ness and of insincerity, the people love him more than 
any other artist has been loved. It is for them that he 
worked, and on every labor one might read as it were 
his motto, *'I will not offend even one of these little 
ones." 

If Eaphael's art was safe in his own hands there can 
Decadence be little doubt that it hastened the decadence of paint- 
of^rehgious -^^^ -^^^ ^-^^ hauds of liis followcrs. His favorite pupil, 
•Ginlio Komano, caught every trick of the master and, 
like the devil citing Scripture, painted pictures to de- 
light the eye so licentious that they cannot now be 
exhibited. Andrea del Sarto sentimentalized the Vir- 
gin, turning tenderness to bathos. -Correggio, the 
most gifted of them all, could do nothing so well as 
depict sensual love. His pictures are hymns to Venus, 
and his women, saints and sinners alike, are houris of 
an erotic paradise. Has the ecstasy of amorous pas- 
sion amounting almost to mystical transport ever been 
better suggested than in the marvellous light and shade 
of his Jupiter and lo? These and many other con- 
temporary artists had on their lips but one song, a 
paean in praise of life, the pomps and glories of this 
goodly world and the delights and beauties of the body. 
But to all men, save those loved by the gods, there 
comes some moment, perhaps in the very heyday of 
success and joy and love, when a sudden ruin falls upon 
the world. The death of one loved more than self, 



art 



ART 



681 



disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure 
of the so cherished cause — all these and many more 
are the gates by which tragedy is bom. And the 
beauty of tragedy is above all other bcautj'' because 
only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of 
the human spirit assert its full majesty. In Shake- 
speare and ]\Iichelangelo it is not the torture that 
pleases us, but the triumph over circumstance. 

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this Michel- 
as the Florentine sculptor who, amidst a world of love i475_i564 
and laughter, lived in wilful sadness, learning how 
man from his death-grapple in the darkness can emerge 
victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is per- 
fected. He was interested in but one thing, man, be- 
cause only man is tragic. lie would paint no por- 
traits — or but one or two — because no living person 
came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong be- 
cause strength only is able to suffer as to do. Nine- 
tenths of them are men rather than women, because 
the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength 
of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early 
figures does he attain calm, — in a Madonna, in David 
or in the Men Bathing, all of them, including the ^la- 
donna with its figures of men in the background, in- 
tended to exhibit the perfection of athletic power. 

But save in these early works almost all that Michel- 
angelo set his hand to is fairly convulsed with passion. 
Leda embraces the swan at the supreme moment of 
conception; Eve, dra^m from the side of Adam, is 
weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard 
struggle- that is life ; the slaves are writhing under their 
bonds as though they were of hot iron ; Moses is start- 
ing from his seat for some tremendous conflict. 
Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine 
Chapel reaches, when it does not surpass, the limit of 
human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, 



682 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together 
^th a riot of strength and *'terribilita." 

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's 
genius found fullest scope in illustrating the idea of 
predestination that obsessed the RefoiTaers and 
haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the 
The Last Last Judgment the artist laid the whole emphasis upon 
Judgment ^.j^^ damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external 
torment by the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed." 
uttered by Christ, not the meek and gentle Man of 
Sorrows, but the rex frcmoidae viajcstatis, a Hercules, 
before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation 
shudders. A quieter, but no less tragic work of art 
is the sculpture on the tomb of Lorenzo de* Medici at 
Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he 
and the four allegorical tngures, two men and two 
women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning 
and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow. So 
they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb 
forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their 
country's and their race's doom. 

But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor 
Raphael love nor Leonardo wonder so beautiful as 
Michelangelo has made tragedy. His sonnets breathe 
a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He 
is like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo : 

Et range devint noir, et dit: — Je suis ramour. 
Mais sou front sombre etait phis charmant que le jour, 
Et je voyais, daus Tombre ou brillaieut ses prunelles, 
Les astres a travers les plumes de ses ailes. 

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic 
genius and the comparative poverty of Northern Eu- 
rope is most apparent when the northern painters cop- 
ied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste 
for Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many 



ART 



683 



travelers, and the demand created a supply of copies 
and imitations. Antwerp became a regular factory 
of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Durer 
and Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of 
them all Holbein was the only one who could really 
compete with the Italians on their ovm ground, and HansHoi- 
that only in one branch of art, portraiture. His stud- Younger 
ies of Henry VIII, and of his wives and courtiers, com- 1497-1543 
bine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty. His 
paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect 
mastery the finest qualities of two rare natures. 

Diirer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the Albert 
most beautiful type, but a few of his portraits can be i47Y_'^i528 
compared w^ith nothing save Leonardo's studies. The 
whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his 
two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange 
blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy 
is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a 
potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522 the 
swine had conquered and but the wTeck of the scholar 
is visible. 

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Diirer 
was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art 
reveals the secret of his genius: **What beauty is, I 
know not ; but for myself I take that which at all times 
has been considered beautiful by the greater number.'* 
This is making art democratic, bringing it down from 
the small coterie of palace and mansion to the home 
of the people at large. Diirer and his compeers were 
enabled to do this by exploiting the new German arts 
of etching and wood-engraving. Pictures were multi- 
plied by hundreds and thousands and sold, not to one 
patron but to the many. Characteristically they re- 
flected the life and thoughts of the common people in 
everj^ homely phase. Pious subjects were numerous, 
because religion bulked large in the common thought, 



684 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

but it was the religion of the popular preacher, trans- 
lating the life of Christ into contemporary^ German life, 
wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love mar- 
vels and they are very literal ; what could be more mar- 
vellous and more literal than Diirer's illustrations of 
the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns 
and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and 
seven eyes are represented exactly as they are de- 
scribed? Diirer neither strove for nor attained any- 
thing but realism. ''I think," he wrote, ''the more 
exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work. 
. . . Others are of another opinion and speak of how 
a man should be . . . but in such things I consider 
nature the master and human imaginations errors." 
It was life he copied, the life he saw around him at 
Nuremberg. 

But Diirer, to use his o^\^l famous criterion of por- 
1513-14 traiture, painted not only the features of Germany, 
but her soul. Three of his woodcuts depict German 
aspirations so fully that they are the best explanation 
of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first 
of these. The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the 
Christian soldier riding through a valley of supernat- 
ural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben nichts an- 
deres dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old 
German translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vul- 
gate. Erasmus in his Handbook of the Christian 
Knight had imagined just such a scene, and so deeply 
had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the 
people's mind that later generations interpreted 
Diirer's knight as a picture of Sickingen or Hutten or 
one of the bold champions of the new religion. 

In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled 
study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun 
shines in and the lion and the little bear doze content- 
edly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study. 



ART 685 

that magician's laboratory that has produced so much 
of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding 
and despair. More than ever before at the opening 
of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast 
oppression of thought. New science had burst the old 
bonds but, withal, the soul still yearned for more. The 
vanity of knowledge is expressed as nowhere else in 
Diirer's Melancholia, one of the world's greatest pic- 
tures. Surrounded by scientific instruments, — the 
compass, the book, the balance, the hammer, the arith- 
metical square, the hour-glass, the bell — sits a woman 
with wings too small to raise her heavy body. Far in 
the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of the 
Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits 
the little bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disor- 
dered fancy of an ovenvrought mind. 

Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance The 
is the love of the grewsomo. In Diirer it took the ""•^'^^i"® 
harmless form of a fondness for monstrosities, — 
rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the 
like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the 
emotions of their contemporaries by painting long 
series known as the Dance of Death, in which some 
man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the 
emperor, tlye soldier, the peasant, the bride, is repre- 
sented as being haled from life by a grinning skeleton. 

Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now 
drawn into the service of the intense party stiniggles 
of the Reformation. To depict the pope or Luther 
or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew 
them with claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's 
tails, drinking and blaspheming. Even kings were 
caricatured, — doubly significant fact! 

As painting and sculpture attained so high a level Archi- 
of maturity in the sixteenth centur}^, one might sup- ^^^^^'^ 
pose that architecture would do the same. In truth, 



6S6 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

however, architecture rather declined. Ver}^ often, 
if not always, each special art-form goes through a 
cycle of youth, perfection, and decay, that remind one 
strongly of the life of a man. The birth of an art is 
due often to some technical invention, the full possi- 
bilities of which are only gradually developed. But 
after the newly opened fields have been exhausted the 
epigoni can do little but recombine, often in fantastic 
ways, the old elements; public taste tunis from them 
and demands something new. 
Churches go the Supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral^ as 
seen at Pisa or Florence or Perugia or Eheims or 
Cologne, was never equalled in the sixteenth century. 
As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take St. 
Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously 
unequal in execution. With characteristic pride and 
self-confidence Pope Julius II to make room for it 
tore down the old church, and other ancient monu- 
ments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve 
centuries. Even by his contemporaries the architect, 
Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante! He made a plan, 
which was started; then he died. In his place were 
appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, 
together or in turn, and towers were added after the 
close of the sixteenth century. The result is the hu- 
gest building in the world, and almost the worst pro- 
portioned. After all, there is something appropriate 
in the fact that, just as the pretensions of the popes 
expanded and their powers decreased, so their churches 
should become vaster and yet less impressive. St. 
Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but 
like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was 
but a hrutum fulmen in the end ! 

The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. 
Peter's, is visible in other sixteenth century ecclesias- 
tical buildings, such as the Badia at Florence. Small 



ART 687 

as this is, there is a certain largeness of line that is not 
Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. 
Etienne du Mont at Paris is another good example of 
the influence of the study of the ancients upon archi- 
tecture. It is difficult to point to a great cathedral 
or church built in Germany during this centuiy. In 
England portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge date from these years, but these portions are 
grafted on to an older style that really determined 
them. The greatest glory of English university ar- 
chitecture, the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, 
was finished in the first years of the century. The 
noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass windows will 
be remembered by all who have seen them. 

After the Reformation ecclesiastical architecture Ecclesiastic 
followed two diverse styles; the Protestants cultivated 
excessive plainness, the Catholics excessive ornament. 
The iconoclasts had no sense for beauty, and thought, 
as Luther put it, that faith was likely to be neglected 
by those who set a high value on external form. 
Moreover the Protestant services necessitated a modifi- 
cation of the medieval cathedral style. What they 
wanted was a lecture hall with pews; the old colmnns 
and transepts and the roomy floor made way for a more 
practical form. 

The Catholics, on the other hand, by a natural re- 
action, lavished decoration on their churches as never 
before. Every column was made ornate, every excuse 
was taken for adding some extraneous embellishment; 
the walls were crowded with pictures and statues and 
carving to delight, or at least to arrest, the eye. But 
it happened that the noble taste of the earlier and 
simpler age failed; amid all possible devices to give 
effect, quiet grandeur was wanting. 

What the people of that secular generation really CasUe* 
built with enthusiasm and success were their own dwell- 



688 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

ings. What are the castles of Chambord and Blois 
and the Louvre and Hampton Court and Heidelberg 
but houses of play and pleasure such as only a child 
could dream of? King and cardinal and noble vied 
in making tower and gable, gallery and court as of a 
fairy palace ; banqueting hall and secret chamber where 
they and their playmates could revel to their heart's 
content and leave their initials carved as^thickly as boys 
carve them on an old school desk. And how richly 
they tilled them! A host of new arts sprang up to 
minister to the needs of these palace-dwellers: our 
museums are still filled with the glass and enamel, the 
vases and porcelain, the tapestry and furniture and 
jewelry that belonged to Francis and Catharine de' 
Medici and Leo X and Elizabeth. How perfect was 
the art of many of th'ese articles of daily use can only 
be appreciated by studying at first hand the salt-cellars 
of Cellini, or the gold and silver and crystal goblets 
made by his compeers. Examine the clocks, of which 
the one at Strassburg is an example; the detail of 
workmanship is infinite; even the striking apparatus 
and the dials showing planetary motions are far be- 
yond our own means, or perhaps our taste. When 
Peter Henlein invented the watch, using as the main- 
spring a coiled feather, he may not have made chron- 
ometers as exact as those turned out nowadays, but 
the ''Nuremberg eggs" — so called from their place of 
origin and their shape, not a disk, but a sphere — were 
marvels of chasing and incrustation and jewelry. 
Loveof The love of the beautiful was universal. The city 

of that time, less commodious, sanitary, and populous 
than it is today, was certainly fairer to the eye. 
Enough of old Nuremberg and Chester and Siena and 
Perugia and many other towns remains to assure us 
that the red-tiled houses, the overhanging storeys, the 
high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented a 



beauty 



ART 689 

far more pleasing appearance tlian do our lines of 
smoky factories and drab dwellings. 

The men so greedy of all delicate sights and pleas- Music 
ant, would fain also stuff their ears with sweet sounds. 
And so they did, within the limitations of a still un- 
developed technique. They had organs, lutes, viols, 
lyres, harps, citherns, horns, and a kind of primitive 
piano known as the clavichord or the clavicembalo. 
Many of these instruments were exquisitely rich and 
delicate in tone, but thej- lacked the range and volume 
and variety of our music. Almost all melodies were 
slow, solemn, plaintive; the tune of Luther's hymn 
gives a good idea of the style then prevalent. When 
we read that the churches adopted the airs of popular 
songs, so that hymns were sung to ale-house jigs and 
catches from the street, we must remember that the 
said jigs and love-songs were at least as sober and 
staid as are many of the tunes now expressly written Paiestrina, 
for our hymns. The composers of the time, especially 
Paiestrina and Orlando Lasso, did wonders within the Lasso, 
limits then jjossible to introduce richness and variety 1594 
into song. 

Art was already on the decline when it came into con- Art and 
flict with the religious revivals of the time. The causes ^^ '^'°" 
of the decadence are not hard to understand. The 
generation of giants, born in tlie latter half of the 
fifteenth century, seemed to exhaust the possibilities 
of artistic expression in painting and sculpture, or at 
least to exhaust the current ideas so expressible. 
Guido Reni and the Caracci could do nothing but imi- 
tate and recombine. 

And then came the battle of Protestant and Catholic 
to turn men's minds into other chaimels than that of 
beauty. Even when the Reformation was not con- 
sciously opposed to art, it shoved it aside as a distrac- 
tion from the real business of life. Thus it has come 



690 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

about in Protestant lands that the public regards art 
as either a "business" or an "education." Luther 
himself loved music above all things and did much to 
popularize it. — while Erasmus shuddered at the psalm- 
singiug he heard from Protestant congregations I Of 
painting the Reformer spoke Tvith admiration, but so 
rarely! What could art be in the life of a man who 
was fighting for his soul's salvation ? Calvin saw more 
clearly the dangers to the soul from the seductions of 
this world's transitory chaiTa. Images he thought 
idolatrous in churches and he said outright: "It 
would be a ridiculous and inept imitation of the papists 
to fancy that we render God more woithy service in 
ornamenting our temples and in employing organs and 
toys of that sort. While the people are thus distracted 
by external things the worship of God is profaned." 
So it was that the Puritans chased all blandishments 
not only from church but from life, and art came to 
be looked upon as a bit immoral. 
Counter- But the little finger of the refoiTuing pope was 
eorma- ^]^^j,^j. fj^^j^ ^j^^ Puritau's loius ; where Calvin had 
chastised with whips Sixtus V chastised with scorpions. 
Adrian \T, the first Catholic Reformer after Luther, 
could not away with "those idols of the heathen," the 
ancient statues. Clement "^T^I for a moment restored 
the old regime of art and licentiousness together, hav- 
ing Perino del Vaga paint his bathroom with scenes 
from the life of Venus in the manner of Giulio Romano. 
But the Council of Trent made severe regulations 
against nude pictures, in pursuance of which Daniel 
da Volterra was appointed to paint breeches on all the 
naked figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and 
on similar paintings. Sixtus V, who could hardly en- 
dure the Laocoon and Apollo Belvidere, was bent on 
destroying the monuments of heathendom. The ruin 
was complete when to her cruel hate the church added 



uoa 



BOOKS 691 

her vet more cniel love. Along came the Jesuits offer- 
ing, like pedlars, instead of the good old article a sub- 
stitute guaranteed by them to be "just as good," and a 
great deal cheaper. Painting was sentimentalized and 
"moralized" under their tuition; architecture adopted 
the baroque style, gaudy and insincere. The church 
was stuffed with gewgaws and tinsel; marble was re- 
placed by painted plaster and saintliness by sickliness. 

§ 5. Books 

The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. Numbers of 
There were then in Germany alone about 100,000 works Ushed^" ' 
printed, or reprinted. If each edition amounted to 
1000 — a fair average, for if many editions were smaller, 
some were much larger — that would mean that about 
a million volumes were offered to the German public 
each year throughout the century. There is no doubt 
that the religious controversy had a great deal to do 
with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the 
same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a 
political campaign now has on the circulation of the 
newspaper. The following figures show how rapidly 
the number of books published in Germany increased 
during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, 
in 1519 260, in 1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, 
and 1521 990. 

Many of these books were short, controversial tracts ; 
some others were intended as pur\"eyors of news pure 
and simple. Some of these broadsides were devoted to 
a single event, as the Ncue Zcitung: Die Schla^M des 
iurkischen Kaisers, others had several items of inter- 1526 
est, including letters from distant parts. Occasion- 
ally a mere lampoon would appear under the title of 
Neue Zeitung, corresponding to our funny papers. 
But these substitutes for modem journals were both 
rare and irregular; the world then got along with much 



692 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

less information about current events than it now 
enjoys. Nor was there anything like our weekly and 
monthly magazines. 

The new age was impatient of medieval literature. 
The schoolmen, never widely read, were widely mocked. 
The humanists, too, fell into deep disgrace, charged 
with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They still 
wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, 
bemoaning their hard lot and deploring the coarse- 
ness of an unappreciative time. Their real fault was 
that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy, and 
the people, who could read for themselves, no longer 
were imposed on by pretensions to esoteric learning 
and a Ciceronian style. 

Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer 
suited the taste of the new generation. A certain class 
continued to read Amadis of Gaul or La Morte d' Ar- 
thur furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that 
they would no longer do. The Puritan found them im- 
moral; the man of the world thought them ridiculous. 
Ascham asserts that ''the whole pleasure" of La Morte 
d' Arthur, ''standeth in two special points, in open 
manslaughter and bold bawdry." The century was 
hardly out when Cervantes published his famous and 
deadly satire on the knight errant. 

But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal 
was transmuted into the pure gold of the poetry of 
Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim to reality was 
abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a 
fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and 
enchantments and hippogryphs, and knights of in- 
credible pugnacity who rescue damsels of miraculous 
beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and 
Loyola came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in 
the honeyed words and the amorous adventures of the 
hero who went mad for love. Another generation, and 



BOOKS 693 

Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a reli- 
gious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Eng- 
lishman, allegorized the whole in such fashion that 
while the conscience was soothed by knowing that all 
the knights and ladies represented moral virtues or 
vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences 
and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the 
Bower of Bliss. And how British that Queen Eliza- 
beth of England should impersonate the principal vir- 
tues ! 

Poetry was in the hearts of the peojole ; song was on 
their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the 
northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought 
with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Sur- 
rey in England. More significant than the output of 
the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric 
talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to 
the public the songs of many writers, some of them 
unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest 
of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and 
the rimes were mostly of ' ^ love, whose month is always 
Ma3^" Each songster poured forth his heart in fresh, 
frank praise of his mistress 's beauty, or in chiding of 
her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There 
was something very simple and direct about it all; 
nothing deeply psychological until at the very end of 
the century Shakespeare's ''sugared sonnets" gave 
his ''private friends" something to think about as 
well as something to enjoy. 

If life could not be all love it could bo nearly all Wit 
laughter. Wit and humor were appreciated above all 
things, and Satire awoke to a sense of her terrible 
power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and 
Marforio, were used as billboards to which the people 
affixed squibbs and lampoons against the government 
and public men. Erasmus laughed at everything; Lu- 



694 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

ther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule; 
a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in 
the art of blackmailing to his wit. 

But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too con- 
temptuously called him, was Rabelais. His laughter 
is as multitudinous as the ocean billows, and as whole- 
some as the sunshine. He laughed not because he 
scorned life but because he loved it ; he did not ' ' warm 
both hands" before the fire of existence, he rollicked 
before its blaze. It cannot be said that he took a 
''slice of life" as his subject, for this would imply a 
more exquisite excision than he would care to make; 
rather he reached out, in the fashion of his time, and 
pulled with both hands from the dish before him, the 
very largest and fattest chunk of life that he could 
grasp. ''You never saw a man," he said of himself, 
"who would more love to be king or to be rich than 
I would, so that I could live richly and not work and 
not worry, and that I might enrich all my friends and 
all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in 
love with everything that the mere repetition of com- 
mon names delighted him. It took pages to tell what 
Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell what he 
drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal 
lavishness and when he played cards, how many games 
do you suppose Rabelais enumerated one after the 
other without pausing to take breath? Two hundred 
and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite 
was like Oargantua's mouth. This was the very 
stamp of the age; it was gluttonous of all pleasures, 
of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and fine dwell- 
ings and merry-making without end, and adventure 
without stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century 
man was a Pantagruel, whose lust for living fully and 
hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of consequences 



BOOKS G95 

dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle 
Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer 
sun. Men saw the world unfolding before them as if 
in a second creation, and they hurled themselves on 
it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too 
backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure 
for themselves. 

And the people were no longer content to leave the 
glory of life to their superiors. They saw no reason Tales of 
why all the good things should be preserved like game ^^^'* 
for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons, for 
the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So 
in literature they were quite content to let the fastid- 
ious gentry read their fill of poetry about knights wan- 
dering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they themselves 
devoured books about humbler heroes. The Pica- 
resque novel in Spain and its counterparts. Till Eulen- 
spiegel or Eeinecke Vos in the north, told the adven- 
tures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his wits 
he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink 
and to make love. 

For those who could not concentrate on a book, there Plays 
was the drama. From the Middle Ages, when the play 
was a vehicle of religious instruction, it developed in 
the period of the Renaissance into a completely secu- 
lar mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite 
literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale 
of seduction, and there Avas alongside of this a popular 
sort of farce knoA\m as the Commedia dell' Arte, in 
which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and 
the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, 
his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill 
in the dialogue and such comic ''business" as tickled 
the fancy of the audience. 

Somewhat akin to these pieces in sjiirit were the 



696 THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

Shrovetide Farces written in Germany by the simple 
Nuremberger who describes himself in the verses, lit- 
erally translatable: 

Hans Sachs is a shoe- 
Maker and poet, too. 

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rongh 
fun of these artless scenes than in the apothegms and 
sound advice in which they abounded. 

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of 
men, typifies the spirit of the age. The one motiv 
is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but al- 
most dies away before the end of the century; the 
other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a 
crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of 
the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated 
by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not 
counting several in other languages. To the Prot- 
estant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder 
Son works. To all, the exile in the far country, the 
riotous living with harlots and the feeding on husks 
with swine, meant the life of this world with its pomps 
and vanities, its lusts and sinful desires that become 
as mast to the soul. The return to the father is the 
return to God's love here below and to everlasting 
felicity above. To those who can believe it, it is the 
most beautiful story in the world. 

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally 
typical of the time, the fable of Faust. Though there 
was a real man of this name, a charlatan and necro- 
mancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited Wit- 
tenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, 
his life was but a peg on which to hang a moral. He 
became the type of the man who had sold his soul to 
the devil in return for the power to know everything, 
to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world. 



BOOKS 697 

The first printed Faust-hook (1587) passed for three 
centuries as a Protestant production, but the discovery 
of an older and quite different form of the legend in 
1897 changed the whole literary problem. It has been 
asserted now that the Faust of this unknown author 
is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor 
at Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with 
Helena recalls the Catholic caricature of Luther's mar- 
riage ; his compact with the devil is such as an apostate 
might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust 
is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counter- 
part, just as in early Christian literature Simon Magus 
is the antithesis of Peter. Faust is the man of Satan 
as Luther was the man of God; their adventures are 
somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose. 

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as 
the Prodigal or Pantagruel. To live to the full; to 
know all science and all mysteries, to drain to the dregs 
the cup crowned with the wine of the pleasure and the 
pride of life : this was worth more than heaven ! The 
full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for 
human experience w^as not brought out until Goethe 
took it up ; but it is implied both in the German Faust- 
books and in Marlowe's play. 

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do jus- Greatness 
tice to the age of the Reformation. We are now at sixteenth 
the end of the period inaugurated by Columbus and Century 
Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their 
contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place 
that it then did, nor does the difference between Cath- 
olic and Protestant any longer seem the most important 
thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the state, 
both of which started on their paths of conquest then, 
are now attacked. 

Again, the application of any statistical method 
makes the former ages seem to shrink in comparison 



698 THE TEMPEE OF THE TIMES 

with the present. In population and wealth, in war 
and in science we are immeasurably larger than our 
ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than 
had Henry VIII, and many a college boy knows more 
astronomy than did Kepler. But if we judge the great- 
ness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from 
us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets 
dreamed and by what its strong men accomplished, the 
importance of the sixteenth century can be appreciated. 
It was an ''experiencing" age. It loved sensation 
with the greediness of childhood; it intoxicated itself 
with Rabelais and Titian, with the gold of Peru and 
with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was 
a daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for 
spiritual liberty, or they gave their lives with Ma- 
gellan to compass the earth or with Bruno to span 
the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed 
with Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ- 
like, or with More of the place where they should be 
just ; or with Michelangelo it pondered the meaning of 
sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. 
And of this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, 
was born the world's supreme poet with an eye to see 
the deepest and a tongue to tell the most of the human 
heart. Truly such a generation was not a poor, nor 
a backward one. Eather it was great in what it 
achieved, sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in 
ripe wisdom and in heroic deeds; full of light and of 
beauty and of life! 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

The historians who have treated the Reformation 
might be classified in a variety of ways : according to 
their national or confessional bias, or by their scien- 
tific methods or by their literary achievement. For 
our present purpose it will be convenient to classify 
them, according to their point of view, into four lead- 
ing schools of thought which, for want of better names 
I may call the Religious-Political, the Rationalist, the 
Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. 
Like all categories of things human these are but 
rough; many, if not most, historians have been influ- 
enced by more than one type of thought. AVhen differ- 
ent philosophies of history prevail at the same time, 
an eclecticism results. The religious and political ex- 
planations were at their height in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, though they survived thereafter; 
the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth cen- 
tury and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth ; the 
liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revo- 
lution and subsided into secondary importance about 
1859, when the economists and Darwinians began to as- 
sert their claims. 

§ 1. The Religious and Political Interpretations. 
(Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) 

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was Early 
a simple one based on the analogy of Scripture. God, 
it was thought, had chosen a peculiar people to serve 
him, for whose instruction and guidance, particularly 
in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a 

699 



Protestants 



700 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and 
martyrs. God's care for the Jews under the old dis- 
pensation was transferred to the church in the new, 
and this care was confined to that branch of the true 
church to which the particular writer and historian 
happened to belong. 
The name The word "Reformation," far older than the move- 

tion" ment to which it applies par eminence, indicates exactly 

what its leaders intended it should be. ''Reform" has 
been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind ; in 
the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a num- 
ber of leaders like Rienzi, and was taken as the pro- 
gram of the councils of Constance and Basle. Luther 
^^^ adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to Duke 
Oeorge stating that ''above all things a common refor- 
mation of the spiritual and temporal estates should be 
undertaken," and he incorporated it in the title of his 
greatest German pamphlet. The other name fre- 
quently applied by Luther and his friends to their 
party was "the gospel." In his own ej^es the Wit- 
tenberg professor was doing nothing more nor less 
than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus and 
Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon 
a sudden to drive away the foggy mists of superstition 
and to restore the purity of the primitive church." 

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply ad libi- 
tum quotations showing that the early Protestants re- 
ferred everything to the general purposes of Provi- 
dence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to 
the impertinent but more assiduous activity of the 
devil. It is interesting to note that they were not 
wholly blind to natural causes. Luther himself saw, 
as early as 1523, the connection between his movement 
and the revival of learning, which he compared to a 
John the Baptist preparing the way for the preaching 
of the gospel. Luther also saw, what many of his 



THE RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATIONS 7(11 

followers did not, that the Reformation was no acci- 
dent, depending on his own personal intervention, but 
was inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. 
"The remedy and suppression of abuses," said he in 
1529, ''was already in full swing before Luther's doc- 
trine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that 
there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous 
revolution, such as Miinzer began, had not a steady 
doctrine intervened." 

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting 
the theory of an overruling Providence, were disposed 
to give due weight to secondary, natural causes. 
Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the 
papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, 
yet recognized that it was rendered possible by the 
invention of printing and by the ''first push and as- 
sault" given by the ungodly humanists. Buniet fol- 
lowed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While 
printing many documents he also was capable, in the 
interests of piety, of concealing facts damaging to the 
Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by 
the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles 
II with the flattering and truthful remark that "the 
first step that was made in the Reformation was the 
restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of tlic 
crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects." 

The task of the contemporary German Protestant 
historian, Seckendorf , was much harder, for the Thirty 
Years War had, as he confesses, made many people 
doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distmst its prin- 
ciples, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the 
thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous eru- 
dition, still valuable to the special student for the docu- 
ments it quotes. 

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Prot- Catholics 
estant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a pho- 



702 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

tograph ; what was raised in one was depressed in the 
other, what was light in one was shade in the other. 
The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct 
divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the 
foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an 
apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the 
devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly 
compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial 
motives were found for his actions, as that he broke 
away from Rome because he failed to get a papal dis- 
pensation to marry. The legend that his protest 
against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of 
the Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the 
pope had committed their sale, was started by Emser 
in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter Martyr d'An- 
ghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic 
and secular historians down to our own day. 

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, 
who found the sole cause of the Reformation in sheer 
depravity, the Catholics produced, prior to 1700, only 
one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of 
Bossuet Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. His History of the Varia- 
tions of the Protestant Churches, written without that 
odious defamation of character that had hitherto been 
the staple of confessional polemic, and with much real 
eloquence, sets out to condemn the Reformers out of 
their own mouths by their mutual contradictions. 
Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies 
is not truth, but the Protestants have almost as many 
varieties as there are pastors. Never before nor since 
has such an effective attack been made on Protestant- 
ism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive 
iteration the moral is driven home: there is nothing 
certain in a religion without a central authority; revolt 
is sure to lead to indifference and atheism in opinion, 
and to the overthrow of all established order in civil 



THE RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATIONS 703 

life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found 
in the admitted corruption of the church, and in the 
personal animosities of the Reformers. The immoral 
consequences of their theories are alleged, as in Lu- 
ther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of 
original sin and his latitudinarian admission of good 
heathens to heaven. 

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed Secular 
was written on the Reformation during this period. ^^'"^"*°* 
It all goes to show how completely men of the most lib- 
eral tendencies were under the influence of their en- 
vironment, for their comments were almost identical 
with those of the most convinced partisans. For the 
most part secular historians neglected ecclesiastical 
history as a separate discipline. Edward Ilall, the 
typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion. 
Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church his- 
tory and not confining himself to politics and war, 
which he considers the proper subject of the annalist. 
Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou passes 
over it with the fewest words, fearing to give oif ence to 
either papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page 
or two on it in all his works. In one place he finds the 
chief cause of the Reformation in a malignant conjunc- 
tion of the stars ; in another he speaks of it as a revival 
of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. 
Polydore Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the 
cause of which he found in the weakness of men's minds 
and their propensity to novelty. 

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Prot- 
estantism contributed by the secular historians of this ^ 
age was the theory that it was largely a political phe- 
nomenon. That there was much truth in this is evi- 
dent; the danger of the theory was in its over-state- 
ment, and in its too superficial application. How 
deeply the Reformation appealed to the political needs 



704 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

of that age has only been shown in the nineteenth cen- 
tury; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolu- 
tions often worked together was beyond the compre- 
hension of even the best minds of that time. The po- 
litical explanation that they offered was simply that 
religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment 
of the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even 
in this there was some truth, but it was far from being 
the larger part. 

1527 Vettori in his History of Italy mentions Luther 

merely to show how the emperor used him as a lever 

Guicciar- against the pope. Guicciardini accounts for the Refor- 
mation by the indignation of the Germans at paying 
money for indulgences. From this beginning, honest 
or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther, carried 
away with ambition and popular applause, nourished 
a party. The pope might easily have allowed the re- 
volt to die had he neglected it, but he took the wrong 
course and blew the tiny spark into a great flame by 
opposing it. 

A number of French writers took up the parable. 
Brantome says that he leaves the religious issue to 
those who know more than he does about it, but he con- 
siders a change perilous, "for a new religion among 
a people demands afterwards a change of govern- 
ment." He thought Luther won over a good many 
of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin Du 
Bellay found the cause of the English schism in 
Henry's divorce and the small respect the pope had for 
his majesty. Davila, de Mezeray and Daniel, writing 
the history of the French civil wars, treated the Hu- 
guenots merely as a political party. So they were, 
but they were something more. Even Hugo Grotius 
could not sound the deeper causes of the Dutch revolt 
and of the religious revolution. 

Sleidan The first of all the histories of the German Reforma- 



THE RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATIONS 705 

tion was also, for at least two centuries, the best. 
Though surpassed in some particulars by others, Slei- 
dan united more of the qualities of a great historian 
than anyone else who wrote extensively on church his- 
tory in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries : fairness, 
accuracy, learning-, skill in presentation. In words 
that recall Ranke's motto he declared that, though a 
Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth sim- 
ply ''rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing re- 
ligious affairs," he continues, "I was not able to 
omit politics, for, as I said before, they almost always 
interact, and in our age least of all can they be sepa- 
rated." "Withal, he regards the Reformation as a 
great victory for God's word, and Luther as a notable 
champion of the true religion. In plain, straightfor- 
ward narrative, without much philosophic reflection, 
he sets forth, — none better, — the diplomatic and theo- 
logical side of the movement without probing its causes 
or inquiring into the popular support on which all the 
rest was based. 

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration Sarpi 
than Sleidan compassed is found in the writings of 
Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the Tridentine 
Council, ' ' as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose 
book could only be published on Protestant soil, this 
historian admired by Macaulay as the best of modern 
times and denounced by Acton as fit for Newgate 
prison, has furnished students with one of the most 
curious of psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion 
of his learning and accuracy, which have recently been 
severely attacked and perhaps discredited, let us ask 
what was his attitude in regard to his subject? It is 
difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic 
apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explana- 
tion of his attacks on the creed in which he believed 
and of his favorable presentation of the acts of the 



706 THE EEFORMATION IXTEKPEETED 

heretics he must have anathematized, is that he was 
a Catholic reformer, one who ardently desired to purify 
the church, but who disliked her political entangle- 
ments. It is not unnatural to compare him with Ad- 
rian VI and Contarini who, in a freer age, had written 
scathing indictments of their own church ; one may also 
find in Dolliuger a parallel to him. Whatever his bias, 
his limitations are obviously those of his age; his ex- 
planations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave 
a full history as introductory to his main subject, were 
exactly those that had been advanced by his prede- 
cessors : it was a divine dispensation, it was caused by 
the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augus- 
tinian and Dominican friars. 

A brilliant anticipation of the modem economic 
school of historical thought is fomid in the Oceana of 
Harrington, who suggested that the causes of the revo- 
lution in England were less religious than social. 
When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey 
and noble into the hands of scions of the people, Har- 
rington thought that he had destroyed the ancient bal- 
ance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling 
feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the 
throne an even more dangerous enemy. 

§ 2. The Eatioistalistic Critique. (The Eighteenth 

CE^'TrKY) 

While the ''philosophers" of the enlightenment were 
not the first to judge the Reformation from a secular 
standpoint, they marked a great advance in historical 
interpretation as compared with the humanists. The 
latter had been able to make of the whole movement 
nothing but either a delusion or a fraud inspired by 
refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw 
deeper into the matter than that ; though for them, also, 
religion was false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when 



THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE 707 

the first knave met the first fool. But they were able 
to see causes of religious change and to point out in- 
structive analogies. 

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs Mon- 
of their adherents and were thus adapted by them *®**J"*^" 
to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing 
Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the 
North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it 
had the spirit of independence whereas the South, nat- 
urally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic 
creed. The divisions among Protestants, too, corre- 
sponded, he said, to their secular polity; thus Luther- 
anism became despotic and Calvinism republican be- 
cause of the circumstances in which each arose. The 
suppression of church festivals in Protestant coun- 
tries he thought due to the greater need and zest for 
labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact 
that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by 
saying that their unadorned cult naturally aroused a 
less warm attachment than the sensuous ritual of Ro- 
manism. 

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. Voltaire 
None other has made history so nearly universal as 
did he, peering into every side of life and into every 
corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, 
no fact was admitted to be inexplicable by natural 
laws. It is true that he was not verj- learned and that 
he had strong prejudices against what he called *'the 
most infamous superstition that ever brutalized man." 
But with it all he brought more freedom and life into 
the story of mankind than had any of his predeces- 
sors. 

For his history of the Reformation he was depend- 
ent on Bossuet, Sarpi, and a few other general works ; 
there is no evidence that he pemsed any of the sources. 
But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. 



70S THE REFORMATION' INTERPRETED 

Bogiiming with an ontliusiastie account of the groiit- 
ness of tlic Ronaissauco, its discovorios, its opulence, 
its roll of mighty names, he procee^is to compare the 
Reformation with the two contemporaneous religious 
revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the 
other in Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one 
else had even thought of looking to comparative reli- 
gion for light. In tracing the course of events he is 
more conventional, finding rather small causes for 
large effects. The whole thing started, he assures us, 
in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the 
spoils of indulgenco- sales. **and this little squabble of 
monks in a comer of Saxony, produced more than a 
hundred years of discord, fury, and misfortune for 
thirty nations." ''England separated from the pope 
because King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted 
because of the painful impression produced by the 
Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in Voltaire's opin- 
ion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal 
to the passions of the mob. The dogmas of the Re- 
formers are considered no whit more rational than 
those of their opponents, save tliat Zwingli is praised 
for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for 
Christianity. Of course he erred," wittily comments 
our author, "but how humane it is to err thus!" The 
influence of Montesquieu is found in the following early 
economic interpretation in the Philosophic Dictionary : 

There are some nations whose religion is the result of 
neither elimate nor sroverument. "Wliat cause detached 
North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland. Holhmd, 
England. Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from ihe Roman 
communion? Poverty. Indnlgences . . . were sold too 
dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the wliole rev- 
enue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion. 

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most 
faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed 



THE RAl^TOXALTSTTC CRITIQUE 700 

perfectly his skepticLsm and scorn for Christianity; 
the other, William Kobertson, everything but that. Robert«on 
Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found 
that the "happy reformation of religion" had pro- 
duced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the 
greatest as well as the most beneficial that has hap- 
pened since the publication of Christianity." Such an 
operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone 
to superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Provi- 
dence." But this Providence worked by natural 
causes, specially prepared, among which he enumer- 
ates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the 
pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the im- 
morality and wealth of the clergy together with their 
immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of 
printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, 
the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines 
of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With 
breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he 
traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Lu- 
ther for his violence, but praised him — and here speaks 
the middle-class advocate of law and order — for his 
firm stand against the peasants in their revolt. 

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well Hume 
as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his supe- 
rior in having completely escaped the spell of the su- 
pernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical 
establishments, vriih which he begins his account of 
the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows 
why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their 
interest to practice on the credulity and passions of 
the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delu- 
sion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore 
incumbent on the civil power to put the church under 
governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at 
that time and directed against the great evil done to 



710 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty 
of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was 
one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reforma- 
tion. Other influences were the invention of printing 
and the revival of learning and the violent, popular 
character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not 
to reason but to the prejudices of the multitude. They 
secured the support of the masses by fooling them into 
the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and 
the support of the government by denouncing doc- 
trines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of 
justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony 
with the general law by which religions tend more and 
more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement 
of the worshipper. Tory as he was, he judged the 
effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the 
execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting 
a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil 
result was that it exalted ''those wretched composers 
of metaphysical polemics, the theologians, " to a point 
of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained. 
Gibbon The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation 

found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few 
pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his 
great history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire. *'A philosopher," he begins, ''who calcu- 
lates the degree of their merit {i.e. of Zwingli, Luther 
and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of 
faith, above or against our reason they have enfran- 
chised the Christians," and, in answering this ques- 
tion he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than 
scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers." 
They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the mir- 
acles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarna- 
tion, the theology of the four or six first councils, the 
Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did 



THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE 711 

not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consult- 
ing their reason in the article of transubstantiation, 
they became entangled in sci-uples, and so Luther main- 
tained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the 
eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon 
and popularized the ''stupendous doctrines of original 
sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to 
such purpose that "many a sober Christian would 
rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a 
cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon 
continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are 
solid and important, and the philosopher must own 
his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their 
hands the lofty fabric of superstition, from the abuse 
of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has 
been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes 
of the monastic profession have been restored to the 
liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no 
longer nourished on daily miracles of images and rel- 
ics; a simple w^orship "the most w^orthy of man, the 
least unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an 
"imitation of paganism." Finally, the chain of au- 
thority was broken and each Christian taught to ac- 
knowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own 
conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as 
a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepti- 
cism. 

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, 
anticipating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done 
harm in retarding the progress of philosophy for cen- 
turies. The Italians, he said, might have effected a 
salutary and rational reform had not Luther inter- 
fered and made the people a party to a dispute which 
should have been left to scholars. 

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven Goethe 
quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the Refor- 



712 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

mation as ''a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, 
error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, 
the truth only here and there heaving in sight." 
Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Lu- 
ther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, 
and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression 
on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash 
we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the 
last years of his long life he changed his opinion some- 
what for, if we can trust the report of his conversa- 
tions with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that 
people hardly reahzed how much they owed to Luther 
who had given them the courage to stand firmly on 
God's earth. 

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants 
underwent a marked change under the influence of Piet- 
ism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Ortho- 
dox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, 
and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Refor- 
mation changed nothing save abuses, so now the lead- 
er's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view 
Lessing of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing apostro- 
phized the Wittenberg professor: ''Luther! thou 
great, misunderstood man ! Thou hast freed us from 
the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more 
unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring 
us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, 
such as Christ himself would teach ? ' ' 

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the 
Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both 
wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the 
endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, 
the devil still appears, though in the background; 
'Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German 
Protestant could then be. 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 713 

§ 3. The Libeeal-Romantic Appreciation. (Circa 
1794-c. 1860) 

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiog- 
raphy underwent a profound change due primarily to 
three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the 
struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a 
century after 1789 ; 2. The Romantic Movement ; 3. The 
rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Refor- 
mation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable 
verdict of the eighteenth century was completely re- 
versed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Prot- 
estant camp has the importance of that movement and 
the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as 
it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. 
Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that 
the finest things about Luther and the most extrava- 
gant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, 
but by the Catholic Dollinger, the Jew Heine, and the 
free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude. 

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled The French 
them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle 
for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Refor- 
mation was one of the favorite examples of this per- 
petual warfare; it teas the Revolution of the earlier 
age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for 
the Rights of ]\[an against a galling tyranny. 

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation Condorcet 
and Revolution was Condorcet in his noble essay on 
The Advance of the Hwnmi Spirit, written in prison 
and published posthumously. Luther, said he, pun- 
ished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples 
from the yoke of the papacy ; he would have freed all, 
save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling 
instinctively that religious liberty would bring polit- 
ical enfranchisement, banded together against the re- 



714 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

volt. He adds that the epoch brought added strength 
to the government and to political science and that it 
purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal celibacy; but 
that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the 
lines) soiled by great atrocities. 

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced 
as the subject for a prize competition, ''What has been 
the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the po- 
litical situation of the several states of Europe and 
on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was 
won by Charles de Villers in an essay maintaining 
elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement 
of the human species has been effected by a series of 
revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the 
object of all these risings has been the attainment of 
either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his 
position in respect to the Reformation, the author 
eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, 
promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Eu- 
rope with a variety of blessings, including almost 
everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Refor- 
mation made Protestant countries more wealthy by 
keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started ''that 
grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared 
the way for a general philosophical enlightenment. 

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with 
more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to 
him: 

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human 
race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to 
think and judge freely and independently of all ideas 
and opinions, which until then Europe had received or 
been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It 
was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason 
and to call things by their right names. It was an in- 
surrection of the human mind against the absolute power 
of the spiritual estate. 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 715 

But there was more than politics to draw the sym- Romantic 
pathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A "^^'"^"^ 
large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tri- 
butes to Luther and the Reformation might be made 
to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that 
time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the 
subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Refor- 
mation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The 
Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The 
Age of the Reformation" (c. 1840). In fact the Refor- 
mation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional 
and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the lim- 
its of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite, to 
scorn the trammels of traditional order and method. 

All this is reflected in Mme. de Stael's enthusiastic Mme.de 

Stael 

appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she 
found a people characterized by reflectiveness, ideal- 
ism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted 
Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrj^men 's 
revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The 
German had brought back religion from an affair of 
politics to be 'a matter of life; had transferred it from 
the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and 
brain. 

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most daz- Heine 
zling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neg- 
lected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To 
a French public, unappreciative of German literature, 
Heine points out that the place taken in France by 
helles lettres is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. 
From Luther to Kant there is one continuous develop- 
ment of thought, and no less than two revolutions in 
spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue 
of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks 
of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of 
the spirit; he made a revolution and not with rose- 



716 THE KEFOEMATION INTERPRETED 

leaves, either, but with a certain ''divine brutality." 
He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought ; 
Luther deposed the pope ; Robespierre decapitated the 
king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrec- 
tion of Man against the same tyrant under different 
names. 

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism 
and the scientific impulse presently to be described, 
most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth 
century wrote. If not the greatest, jet the most lov- 
able of them all, was Jules Michelet, a free-thinker of 
Huguenot ancestry. His History of France is like 
the biography of some loved and worshipped genius; 
he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. 
And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but 
one inexorable question, "What did you do for the 
people?" and according to their answer they stand or 
fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what 
entirely escaped previous generations), that the "peo- 
ple" here means that part of it now called, in current 
cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle class 
with some small property and with the vote. For the 
ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little 
concern as he had small patience with king and noble 
and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries 
prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that 
made him a model husband and father, faithfully per- 
forming a daily task for an adequate reward. Lu- 
ther's joys, he assures us, were "those of the heart, of 
the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. 
AVhat family more holy, what home more pure?" But 
he returns ever and again to the thought that the Hu- 
guenots were the republicans of their age and that, 
"Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we 
exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of 
human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 717 

To whom do I owe the power of publishing what 
I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern 
thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless 
rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest 
pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of 
their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Cath- 
erine de^ Medici. 

English liberalism found its perfect expression in Froude 
the work of Froude. Built up on painstaking research, 
readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the I | 
English Protestant middle class. The History of Eng- 
land from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Span- 
ish Armada won a resounding immediate success. 
Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, 
and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, 
he thought, triumphed because they were armed with 
the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, 
a real religion over against *'a superstition which 
was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" 
and which, at that time, *' meant the stake, the rack, 
the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil en- 
throned." It was the different choice made then by 
England and Spain that accounted for the greatness 
of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after 
the Spaniard, once ''the noblest, grandest and most en- 
lightened people in the known world," had chosen for 
the saints and the Inquisition, ''his intellect shrivelled 
in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self -bandaged 
limbs. ' ' 

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the Liberals 
whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm 
belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its 
great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral 
effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the de- 
cay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed 
to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, 



718 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appre- 
ciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, 
the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans 
'Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reforma- 
tion as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. 
Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. 
Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said 
that his '^religious movement was the foundation of 
so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's 
conscience animating sympathetically the conscience 
of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ulti- 
mated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, New- 
tons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of 
all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sym- 
pathy between the age of the Reformation and that 
of Victoria. The creations of the one. Protestantism, 
the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached 
their perfect maturity in the other. The very mod- 
erate liberals of the latter found in the former just 
that ' ' safe and sane ' ' spirit of reform which they could 
thoroughly approve. 

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in 
France, England and America, was supplemented in 
Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Lu- 
ther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in 
the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteous- 
ness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French 
deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent 
Speeches to the German Nation, called the Reforma- 
tion **the consummate achievement of the German peo- 
ple," and its ''perfect act of world-wide significance." 
Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public 
to search for a German state at once national and lib- 
eral. In his Pictures from the German Past, largely 
painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all 
the high-lights on ''Deutschtum" and ''Burgertum," 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 719 

and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. 
With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F. 
Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, 
rather than superficial culture, ''the better part," ''the 
one thing needful, ' ' which was truth. 

It is now high time to say something of the third Scientific 
great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, ^^^" 
transformed historiography. It was the rise of the sci- 
entific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world 
lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had 
gradually become accustomed to the thought of an ex- 
ternal nature governed by an unbreakable chain of 
cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, 
with his free will, was an exception and that history, 
therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's 
arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part 
inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the 
past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniform- 
ity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more 
"natural" did the progress of the human race seem. 
When it was found that every age had its own temper 
and point of view, that men turned with one accord in 
the same direction as if set by a current, long before 
any great man had come to create the current, the in- 
fluence of personality seemed to sink into the back- 
ground, and that of other influences to be preponderant. 

Quite inevitably the first natural and important phi- Hegel 
losophy of history took a semi-theological, semi-per- 
sonal form. The philosopher Hegel, pondering on the 
fact that each age has its own unmistakable "time- 
spirit ' ' and that each age is a natural, even logical, de- 
velopment of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine 
of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. 
History was but the development of spirit, or the real- 
ization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the 
necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." 



720 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

The Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some 
are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, 
or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was 
one of the longest steps. The characteristic of modern 
times is that the spirit is conscious of its own freedom 
and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The 
dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of 
the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the 
Reformation. In order to prove his thesis, Hegel la- 
bors to show that the cause of the Protestant revolt in 
the corruption of the church was not accidental but 
necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of pro- 
gress, that which is adored must necessarily be sensu- 
ous, but at the lofty German level the worshipper must 
look for God in the spirit and heart, that is, in faith. 
The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity 
manifesting the self -consciousness of the world-spirit ; 
his doctrine of the eucharist, conservative as it seems to 
the rationalist, is in reality a manifestation of the same 
spirituality, in the assertion of an immediate relation 
of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of the Ref- 
ormation is said to be that man in his very nature is 
destined to be free, and all history since Luther's time 
is but a working out of the implications of his position. 
If only the Germanic nations have adopted Protestant- 
ism, it is because only they have reached the highest 
state of spiritual development. 

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand 
Christian Baur, of whom it has been said that he rather 
deduced history than narrated it. With much detail 
he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far 
as the subject of church history was concerned. He 
showed that the Reformation (a term to which he ob- 
jected, apparently preferring Division, or Schism) was 
bound to come from antecedents already in full opera- 
tion before Luther. At most, he admitted, the per- 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 721 

sonal factor was decisive of the time and place of the 
inevitable revolution, but said that the most powerful 
personality would have been helpless but for the popu- 
larity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he 
deduced the causes of the movement from the corrup- 
tion of the medieval church, and like him he regarded 
all later history as but the tide of which the first wave 
broke in 1517. The true principle of the movement, 
religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he be- 
lieved, had been achieved only for states in the six- 
teenth century, but thereafter logically and necessarily 
came to be applied to individuals. 

From the Hegelian school came forth the best Ranke 
equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the 
highest quality of thought and emotion that is the pre- 
rogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked 
nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of tal- 
ent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It 
was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its 
own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard 
to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Think- 
ing the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom 
allowed his o^vn opinions to appear. In treating the 
Reformation he was "first an historian and then a 
Christian. ' ' There is in his work little biography, and 
that little psychological ; there is no dogma and no po- 
lemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the 
"spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of 
the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter- 
reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of 
the word "Counter-reformation" — coined in 1770 and 
obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter- 
revolution." The causes of the Reformation Ranke 
found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to 
the disorders of a merely assenting faith and service 
of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the 



722 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, 
he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking 
down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and 
establishing in its stead ''a completely autonomous 
state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considera- 
tions and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas 
which have aided in the development of modern Europe 
he esteemed this the most eifective. Would he have 
thought so after 1919? 

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws 
was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of de- 
parture was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but 
rather certain very particular sociological facts as in- 
terpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same 
percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, 
because crimes vary in a constant curve according to 
season, because the number of suicides and of mar- 
riages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, 
Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, 
must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At 
present we are concerned only with his views on the 
Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any 
period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general 
culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholi- 
cism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the six- 
teenth century was to the darkness of the earlier cen- 
turies. Credulity and ignorance were still common, 
though diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intel- 
lectual change was the cause of the religious change. 
Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, 
namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he 
puts it, ''according to the natural order," the ''most 
civilized countries should be Protestant and the most 
uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has not always been so. 
In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reforma- 



LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION 723 



tioii as an uprising of the human mind, an enlighten- 
ment, and a democratic rebellion. 

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation 
of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated 
eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best 
classified as a member of the new school. His History 
of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism 
is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His 
main object is to show how little reason has to do with 
the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how 
much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, de- 
termined by quite other causes. He found the essence 
of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent 
habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done 
more than any other movement to emancipate the mind 
from superstition and to secularize society. 

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, Protestants 
in the short space at my command, the principal Prot- 
estant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. 
Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the 
old "truths," Merle d'Aubigne won an enormous and 
unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory 
of the Protestant revolution, with such modern con- 
notations and modifications as suited the still lively 
prejudices of the evangelical public of England and 
America; for it was in these countries that his book, 
in translation from the French, won its enormous cir- 
culation.^ 

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Ref- Doiiinger 
ormation was expressed by the Catholic Dollinger, the 
most theological of liistorians, the most historically- 
minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really 

1 The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 
1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 
were sold in England and America. 



724 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

founded a new religion, of which the center was the 
mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification 
by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Lu- 
ther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, 
made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable 
that when he broke with Rome he did not become a 
Protestant. 

§ 4. The Economic and Evolutionary Interpreta- 
tions. (1859 TO THE Present) 

The year 1859 saw the launching of two new theories 
of the utmost importance. These, together with the 
political developments of the next twelve years, com- 
pletely altered the view-point of the intellectual class, 
as well as of the peoples. In relation to the subject 
under discussion this meant a reversal of historical 
judgment as radical as that which occurred at the time 
of the French Revolution. The three new influences, 
in the order of their immediate importance for histori- 
ography, were the following: 1. The publication of 
Marx's Zur Kritik der polltischen Okonomie in 1859, 
containing the germ of the economic interpretation of 
history later developed in Das Kapital (1867) and in 
other works. 2. The laublication of Darwin's Origin 
of Species, giving rise to an evolutionary treatment of 
history. 3. The Bismarckian wars (1864-71), fol- 
lowed by German intellectual and material hegemony, 
and the defeat of the old liberalism. This lasted only 
until the Great War (1914-18), when Germany was 
cast down and liberalism rose in more radical guise 
than ever. 

Karl Marx not only viewed history for the first time 
from the point of view of the proletariat, or working 
class, but he directly asserted that in the march of man- 
kind the economic factors had always been, in the last 
analysis, decisive ; that the material basis of life, par- 



ECONOMIC INTERPRETATIONS 725 

ticularly the system of production, determined, in gen- 
eral, the social, political and religious ideas of every 
epoch and of every locality. Revolutions follow as the 
necessary consequence of economic change. In the 
scramble for sustenance and wealth class war is postu- 
lated as natural and ceaseless. The old Hegelian anti- 
thesis of idea versus personality took the new form of 
''the masses" versus "the great man," both of whom 
were but puppets in the hands of overmastering de- 
terminism. As often interpreted, Marx's theory re- 
placed the Hegelian "spirits of the time" by the 
classes, conceived as entities struggling for mastery. 

This brilliant theory suffered at first in its applica- 
tion, which was often hasty, or fantastic. As the eco- 
nomic factor had once been completely ignored, so now 
it was overworked. Its major premise of an "eco- 
nomic man," all greed and calculation, is obviously 
false, or rather, only half true. Men's motives are 
mixed, and so are those of aggregates of men. There 
are other elements in progress besides the economic 
ones. The only effective criticism of the theory of 
economic determination is that well expressed by Dr. 
Shailer Mathews, that it is too simple. Self-interest 
is one factor in history, but not the only one. 

Exception can be more justly taken to the way in Bax 
which the theory has sometimes been applied than 
to its formulation. Belfort Bax, maintaining that the 
revolt from Rome was largely economic in its causes, 
gave as one of these "the hatred of the ecclesiastical 
hierarchy, obviously due to its increasing exactions." 
Luther would have produced no result had not the 
economic soil been ready for his seed, and with that 
soil prepared he achieved a world-historical result 
even though, in Bax's opinion, his character and in- 
tellect were below those of the average English vil- 
lage grocer-deacon who sold sand for sugar. Luther, 



726 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

in fact, did no more than give a flag to those discon- 
tented with the existing political and industrial life. 
Strange to say, Bax found even the most radical party, 
that of the communistic Anabaptists, retrograde, with 
its program of return to a golden age of gild and com- 
mon land. 

A somewhat better grounded, but still inadequate, 
solution of the problem was offered by Karl Kautsky. 
He, too, found the chief cause of the revolt in the spolia- 
tion of Germany by Rome. In addition to this was 
the new rivalry of commercial classes. Unlike Bax, 
Kautsky finds in the Anabaptists Socialists of whom 
he can thoroughly approve. 

The criticism that must be made of these and similar 
attempts, is that the causes picked out by them are too 
trivial. To say that the men who, by the thousands 
and tens of thousands suffered martyrdom for their 
faith, changed that faith simply because they objected 
to pay a tithe, reminds one of the ancient Catholic der- 
ivation of the whole movement from Luther's desire 
to marry. The effect is out of proportion to the cause. 
But some theorists were even more fantastic than 
trivial. When Professor S. N. Patten traces the 
origins of revolutions to either over-nutrition or under- 
nutrition, and that of the Reformation to ''the growth 
of frugalistic concepts"; when Mr. Brooks Adams as- 
serts that it was all due to the desire of the people for 
a cheaper religion, exchanging an expensive offering 
for justification by faith and mental anguish, which 
cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible 
— we feel that the dish of theory has run away with the 
spoon of fact. The climax was capped by the German 
sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the Re- 
formation by the law of the operation of force along the 
line of least resistance. The Reformers, by sending 
the soul straight to God, spared it the detour via the 



ECONOMIC INTERPRETATIONS 727 

priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it were, and sav- 
ing energy. 

The genius who first and most fully worked out a Lamprecht 
tenable economic interpretation of the Lutheran move- 
ment was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in much the 
same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, 
that of an independent, eclectic and better informed 
student. Lamprecht, as it is well known, divides his- 
tory into periods according to their psychological char- 
acter — perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism — but he 
maintains, and on the whole successfully, that the tem- 
per of each of these epochs is determined by their eco- 
nomic institutions. Thus, says he, the condition of the 
transition from medieval to modem times was the 
development of a system of ''money economy" from 
a system of ''natural economy," which took place 
slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th cen- 
turies. "The complete emergence of capitalistic ten- 
dencies, with their consequent effects on the social, 
and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual sphere, 
must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht 
shows how the rise of capitalism was followed by the 
growth of the cities and of the culture of the Renais- 
sance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in 
large part as a natural consequence of the increased 
power and scope given to the ego by the possession of 
wealth. This individualism, he thinks, strengthened 
by and strengthening humanism, was made forever 
safe by the Reformation. 

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points 
out, to suppose that we are living in the same era of 
civilization, psychologically considered, as that of Lu- 
ther. Our subjectivism is as different from his in- 
dividualism as his modernity was from medievalism. 
The eighteenth century was a transitional period from 
the one to the other. 



728 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, 
continues Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, 
was the change from *'polydynamism," or the worship 
of many saints, and the mediation of manifold religious 
agencies, to ''monodynamism" or the direct and single 
intercourse of the soul with God. Still more different 
was the world-view of the nineteenth century, built on 
**an extra-Christian, though not yet anti-Christian 
foundation. ' ' 

In the very same year in which Lamprecht 's volume 
on the German Reformation appeared, another inter- 
pretation, though less profound and less in the eco- 
nomic school of thought, was put forth by A. E. Berger. 
He found the four principal causes of the Reformation 
in the growth of national self -consciousness, the over- 
throw of an ascetic for a secular culture, individualism, 
and the growth of a lay religion. The Reformation it- 
self was a triumph of conscience and of ''German in- 
wardness, ' ' and its success was due to the fact that it 
made of the church a purely spiritual entity. 

The most brilliant essay in the economic interpre- 
tation of the origins of Protestantism, though an essay 
in a very narrow field, was that of Max Weber which 
has made ''Capitalism and Calvinism" one of the 
watchwords of contemporary thought. The intimate 
connection of the Reformation and the merchant class 
had long been noticed, e. g. by Froude and by Thorold 
Rogers. But Weber was the first to ask, and to an- 
swer, the question what it was that made Protestant- 
ism particularly congenial to the industrial type of civ- 
ilization. In the first place, Calvinism stimulated just 
those ethical qualities of rugged strength and self- 
confidence needful for worldly success. In the second 
place. Protestantism abolished the old ascetic ideal of 
labor for the sake of the next world, and substituted 
for it the conception of a calling, that is, of doing 



ECONOMIC INTERPRETATIONS 729 

faithfully the work appointed to each man in this world. 
Indeed, the word ''calling" or ''Beraf," meaning God- 
given work, is found only in Germanic languages, and 
is wanting in all those of the Latin group. The ethical 
idea expressed by Luther and more strongly by Calvin 
was that of faithfully performing the daily task; in 
fact, such labor was inculcated as a duty to the point 
of pain; in other words it was ''a worldly asceticism." 
Finally, Calvin looked upon thrift as a duty, and re- 
garded prosperity, in the Old Testament style, as a sign 
of God's favor. "You may labor in that manner as 
tendeth most to your success and lawful gain," said the 
Protestant divine Richard Baxter, ' ' for you are bound 
to improve all your talents." And again, ''If God 
show you a way in which you may lawfully get more 
than in another way, if you refuse this and choose the 
less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your 
calling, and you refuse to be God's steward." 

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the 
controversy caused by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, 
like Knodt, denied its validity, tracing capitalism back 
of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin ; but most 
accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it 
were otfered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky 
and Ashley. So commonly has it been received that it 
has finally been summed up in a brilliant but superficial 
epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been 
coined by him — though it is not, I believe, from his 
mint — that the Reformation was "the Revolution of 
the rich against the poor." 

Contemporary with the economic historiography, Darwinism 
there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one 
superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded 
far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philoso- 
phers" had blamed the Reformers for not coming up 
to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured 



730 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

them for falling below the standard of their own age. 
Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more 
searching than had been that of the old deism. 

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that 
the Reformation was the child, or sister, of the Renais- 
sance, and the parent of the Enlightenment and the 
French Revolution. '*We are in the midst of a gigan- 
tic movement," wrote Huxley, ''greater than that 
which preceded and produced the Reformation, and 
really only a continuation of that movement." ''The 
Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude, 
incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving 
after the liberation of man from the darkness. " " The 
truth is," according to Symonds, "that the Reforma- 
tion was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emanci- 
pation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, 
more important, indeed, in its political consequences, 
more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic develop- 
ments than was the Italian Renaissance, but none the 
less an outcome of the same grand influence." Wil- 
liam Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the 
essence of the Reformation w^as the same in the re- 
ligious fields as that of the best thought contemporary 
to it in other lines. 

But these ideas were already obsolescent since 
Friedrich Nietzsche had worked out, with some care, 
the thought that "the Reformation was a re-action of 
old-fashioned minds, against the Italian Renaissance." 
One might suppose that this furious Antichrist, as he 
wished to be, would have thought well of Luther be- 
cause of his opinion that the Saxon first taught the 
Germans to be unchristian, and because "Luther's 
merit is greater in nothing than that he had the cour- 
age of his sensuality — then called, gently enough, 
'evangelic liberty.' " But no! With frantic passion 
Nietzsche charged: "The Reformation, a duplication 



NIETZSCHE 731 

of the medieval spirit at a time when this spirit no 
longer had a good conscience, pullulated sects, and su- 
perstitions like the witchcraft craze." German cul- 
ture was just ready to burst into full bloom, only one 
night more was needed, but that night brought the 
stonn that ruined all. The Eeformation was the peas- ^ 
ants' revolt of the human spirit, a rising full of sound 
and fury, but signifying nothing. It was ' ' the rage of 
the simple against the complex, a rough, honest misun- 
derstanding, in which (to speak mildly) much must be 
forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore apart a cul- 
ture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not 
relish. Behind the formula ''every man his own 
priest" lurked nothing but the abysmal hatred of the ^ 
low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at its 
worst. 

Quite slowly but surely Nietzsche's opinion gained Acceptance 
ground until one may say that it was, not long ago, Nietzsche's 
generally accepted. ''Our sympathies are more in opinion 
unison, our reason less shocked by the arguments 
and doctrines of Sadolet than by those of Calvin," 
wrote E.. C. Christie. Andrew D. White's popular 
study of Tlie Warfare of Science and Theology proved 
that Protestant churches had been no less hostile 
to intellectual progress than had the Catholic church. 
"The Eeformation, in fact," opined J. M. Eobert- 
son, "speedily overclouded with fanaticism what 
new light of free thought had been glimmering be- 
fore, turning into Bibliolaters those who had ration- 
ally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries and 
forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined 
spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance 
of their age." "Before the Lutheran revolt," said 
Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought and speech 
was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after. " Simi- 
lar opinions might be collected in large number ; I men- 



732 THE REFOEMATION INTERPEETED 

tion only the works of Bezold and the brief but ad- 
mirably expressed articles of Professor George L. 
Burr, and that of Lemonnier, who places in a strong 
light the battle of the Renaissance, intellectual, indif- 
ferent in religion and politics, but aristocratic in tem- 
per, and the Reformation, reactionary, religious, pre- 
occupied with medieval questions and turning, in its 
hostility to the governing orders, to popular politics. 

The reaction of the Reformation on religion was 
noticed by the critics, who thus came to agree with the 
conservative estimate, though they deplored what the 
others had rejoiced in. Long before Nietzsche, J. 
Burckhardt had pointed out that the greatest danger 
to the papacy, secularization, had been adjourned for 
centuries by the German Reformation. It was this 
that roused the papacy from the soulless debasement 
in which it lay ; it was thus that the moral salvation of 
the papacy was due to its mortal enemies. 
Troeltsch The twentieth century has seen two brilliant critiques 

of the Reformation from the intellectual side by 
scholars of consummate ability, Ernst Troeltsch and 
George Santayana. The former begins by pointing 
out, with a fineness never surpassed, the essential one- 
ness and slight differences between early Protestant- 
ism and Catholicism. The Reformers asked the same 
questions as did the medieval schoolmen and, though 
they gave these questions somewhat different answers, 
their minds, like those of other men, revealed them- 
selves far more characteristically in the asking than 
in the reply. * ' Genuine early Protestantism . . . was 
an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization (kirchliche 
ZAvangskultur), a claim to regulate state and society, 
science and education, law, commerce, and industry, ac- 
cording to the supernatural standpoint of revelation. ' ' 
The Reformers separated early and with cruel violence 
from the humanistic, philological, and philosophical 



TROELTSCH 733 

theology of Erasmus because they were conscious of 
an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was 
with assurance of salvation, and this could only be won 
at the cost of a miracle, not any longer the old, outward 
magic of saints and priestcraft, but the wonder of faith 
occurring in the inmost center of personal life. ''The 
sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its 
stead appears the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin 
and weakness, can grasp and confidently assent to such 
a thought." Thus it came about that the way of sal- 
vation became more important than the goal, and 
the tyranny of dogma became at last unbearable. 
Troeltsch characterizes both his own position and 
that of the Reformers when he enumerates among the 
ancient dogmas taken over naively by Luther, that of 
the existence of a personal, ethical God. Finely con- 
trasting the ideals of Renaissance and Reformation, he Renais- 
shows that the former was naturalism, the latter an in- !f "I^® ^^• 

. neiorma- 

tensification of religion and of a convinced other- tion 
worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was 
based on ''affirmation of life," that of the latter was 
based on "calling." Even as compared with Catholi- 
cism, Troeltsch thinks, supererogatory works were abol- 
ished because each Protestant Christian was bound to 
exert himself to the utmost at all times. The learned 
professor hazards the further opinion that the spirit of 
the Renaissance amalgamated better with Catholicism 
and, after a period of quiescence, burst forth in the 
"frightful explosion" of the Enlightenment and Revo- 
lution, both more radical in Catholic countries than in 
Protestant. But Troeltsch is too historically-minded 
to see in the Reformation only a reaction. He believes 
that it contributed to the fonnation of the modern 
world by the development of nationalism, individual- 
ism (qualified by the objectively conceived sanction of 
Bible and Christian community), moral health, and, 



734 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

indirectly, by the introduction of the ideas of tolerance, 
criticism, and religious progress. Moreover, it en- 
riched the world with the story of great personalities. 
Protestantism was better able to absorb modem ele- 
ments of political, social, scientific, artistic and eco- 
nomic content, not because it was professedly more 
open to them, but because it was weakened by the 
memory of one great revolt from authority. But the 
great change in religion as in other matters came, 
Troeltsch is fully convinced, in the eighteenth century. 
Santayana If Trocltscli has the head of a skeptic with the heart 
of a Protestant, Santayana 's equally irreligious brain 
is biased by a sentimental sympathy for the Catholi- 
cism in which he was trained. The essence of his criti- 
cism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully re- 
marked, no one could be more unintelligent, is that 
he moved away from the ideal of the gospel. Saint 
Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, 
ascetic; Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for 
it is convinced of the importance of success and pros- 
perity, abominates the disreputable, thinks of con- 
templation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of 
poverty as a punishment, and of married and indus- 
trial life as typically godly. In short, it is a reversion 
to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that 
Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for 
there would have been, he affirms, a Catholic revival 
without him. With all its old-fashioned insistence that 
dogma was scientifically true and that salvation was 
urgent and fearfully doubtful. Protestantism broke 
down the authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal 
to make one part of an organic system the instrument 
for attacking the other part." It is the beauty and 
torment of Protestantism that it leads to something 
ever beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a 
pious skepticism. Under the solvent of self-criticism 



SANTAYANA 735 

German religion and philosophy have dropped, one by 
one, all supernaturalism and comforting private hopes 
and have become absorbed in the duty of living man- 
fully the conventional life of the world. Positive re- 
ligion and frivolity both disappear, and only '^ conse- 
crated worldliness" remains. 

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation 
was a progressive movement has been recently offered Recent 
by eminent scholars. Gr. Monod says that the differ- "p^"'°"^ 
ence between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the 
former created a closed philosophy, the latter left much 
open. ''The Reformation," according to H. A. L. 
Fisher, ''was the great dissolvent of European con- 
servatism. A religion which had been accepted with 
little question for 1200 years, which had dominated 
European thought, moulded European customs, shaped 
no small part of private law and public policy . . . was 
suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive 
communities of the West." 

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance 
undermined the medieval theory of authority in a few 
choice minds, the Reformation made the first really 
serious breach in that theory. It is just because the 
fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from 
anarchism) began in the religious field, that its tri- 
umph is now most complete in that field. We are still 
bound politically and economically; that we are free 
religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in 
Mr. Russell's opinion, that subjectivism has been fos- 
tered in Protestant morality. 

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form, has 
been expressed by Salomon Reinach. "Instead of 
freedom of faith and thought the Reformation pro- 
duced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds 
of religious liberty were there, though it was only after 
two centuries that they blossomed and bore fruit, 



736 THE EEFORMATION INTERPRETED 

thanks to the breach made by Luther in the ancient edi- 
fice of Rome." 
German ^ judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, 

to the effect that, though the logical result of some of 
Luther's premises would have been individual religion 
and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out, 
**his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no re- 
semblance whatever to our subjectivism." His true 
originality was his personality which imposed on an 
optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true 
that the revolution was profound and yet it was not 
modern: ''the classic spirit, free institutions, demo- 
cratic ideals, all these great forces by which we live 
are not the heritage of Luther." 

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept 
over Europe with the Bismarckian wars, men began to 
judge the Reformation as everything else by its rela- 
tion, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. 
Even in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to 
exactly what this relation was. Paul de Lagarde ideal- 
ized the Middle Ages as showing the perfect expression 
of German character and he detested ''the coarse, 
scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two 
hobnailed shoes, and who by his demagogy, brought in 
barbarism and split Germany into fragments." Nev- 
ertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation 
meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it signifi- 
cant that the Basques, who were not a nation, should 
have produced, in Loyola and Xavier, the two greatest 
champions of the anti-national church. 

The tide soon started flowing the other way and 
scholars began to see clearly that in some sort the Ref- 
ormation was a triumph of "Deutschtum" against 
the "Romanitas" of Latin religion and culture. 
Treitschke, as the representative of this school, trump- 
eted forth that "the Reformation arose from the good 



GERMAN PATRIOTS 



737 



The Great 
War 



German conscience," and that, ''the Reformer of our 
clmrcli was the pioneer of the whole German nation on 
the road to a freer civilization." The dogma that 
might makes right was adopted at Berlin — as Acton 
wrote in 1886 — and the mere fact that the Reformation 
was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness 
by historians like Waitz and Kurtz, 

Naturally, all was not as bad as this. A rather at- 
tractive form of the thesis was presented by Karl Sell. 
Whereas, he thinks. Protestantism has died, or is dy- 
ing, as a religion, it still exists as a mood, as bibli- 
olatry, as a national and political cult, as a scientific 
and technical motive-power, and, last but not least, as 
the ethos and pathos of the Germanic peoples. 

In the Great War Luther was mobilized as one of the 
German national assets. Professor Gustav Kawerau 
and many others appealed to the Reformer's writings 
for inspiration and justification of their cause ; and the 
German infantry sang ''Ein' feste Burg" while march- 
ing to battle. 

Even outside of Germany the war of 1870 meant, in 
many quarters, the defeat of the old liberalism and the 
rise of a new school inclined, even in America — witness 
Mahan — to see in armed force rather than in intel- 
lectual and moral ideas the decisive factors in history. 
Many scholars noticed, in this connection, the shift of 
power from the Catholic nations, led by France, to 
the Protestant peoples, Germany, England and Amer- 
ica. Some, like Acton, though impressed by it, did not 
draw the conclusion ably presented by a Belgian, Emile 
de Laveleye, that the cause of national superiority lay 
in Protestantism, but it doubtless had a wide influence, 
partl}^ unconscious, on the verdict of history. 

But the recoil was far greater than the first move- 
ment. Paul Sabatier wrote (in 1913) that until 1S70 
Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of thoughtful ideals 



Reaction 

against 

German 



738 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic 
virtues and its openness to science and literary criti- 
cism. This high opinion, strengthened by the prestige 
of German thought, was shattered, says our authority, 
by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train of 
horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved 
of their superiority and attributed to Luther the result 
of Sedan. 

The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of 
Luther. *' Literary and philosophic Germany," said 
Denys Cochin in an interview, ''prepared the evolution 
of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty 
and aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and 
seconded the aberration. ' ' 
Paquier Paquicr has written a book around the thesis: 

' ' Nothing in the present war would have been alien to 
Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was violent 
and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, 
but it is the logical conclusion of the religious revolu- 
tion accomplished by Luther and of the philosophical 
revolution accomplished by Kant." He finds the 
causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two 
important doctrines and several corollaries. First, the 
doctrine of justification by faith meant the disparage- 
ment of morality and the exaltation of the end at the 
expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the 
state. Finally, in his narrow patriotism, Luther is 
thought to have inspired the reckless deeds of his pos- 
terity. 

On the other hand some French Protestants, notably 
Weiss, have sought to show that the modern doctrines 
of Prussia were not due to Luther but were an apostasy 
from him. 

Practically all the older methods of interpreting 
the Reformation have survived to the present ; to save 
space they must be noticed with the utmost brevity. 



HARNACK 739 

The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have Protestants 
all, as far as they are worthy of serious notice, escaped 
from the crudely supernaturalistic point of view. 
Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are con- 
servative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their 
own. Harnack sees in Luther, as he does in Christ Hamack 
and Paul and all other of his heroes, exactly his own 
German liberal Evangelical mind. He is inclined to 
admit that Luther was little help to the progress 
of science and enlightenment, that- he did not absorb 
the cultural elements of his time nor recognize the 
right and duty of free research, but yet he thinks the 
Reformation more important than any other revolution 
since Paul simply because it restored the true, i. e. 
Pauline and Harnackian theology. Loisy's criticism 
of him is brilliant: "What would Luther have thought 
had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to 
him with the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or 
with this amendment, * faith in the merciful Father, for 
faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus'!" 
The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that ac- 
corded by Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy re- 
marks, deduce from it the same humanitarian deism as 
that now fashionable at Berlin. 

I should like to speak of the work of Below and 
Wernle, of Bohmer and Kohler, of Fisher and Walker 
and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant scholars, 
by which I have profited. But I can only mention one 
other Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who 
find the Reformation (quite naturally) too conservative 
for them. Laurent wrote in this sense in 1862-70, and 
he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of Prot- 
estant apologists, Charles Beard. Beard saw in the Beard 
Reformation the subjective form of religion over 
against the objectivity of Catholicism, and also, "the 
first great triumph of the scientific spirit" — the Ren- 



740 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 



Philoso- 
phers 



aissance, in fact, applied to theology. And j^et he 
found its work so imperfect and even hampering at 
the time he wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his 
book was to advocate a new Reformation to bring 
Christianity in complete harmony with science. 

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than 
creed, adopted the Protestant standpoint. Eucken 
thinks that "the Reformation became the animating 
soul of the modem world, the principle motive-force of 
its progress. ... In truth, every phase of modern life 
not directly or indirectly connected with the Reforma- 
tion has something insipid and paltry about it." 
"Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from 
mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, 
and that the stamp of the conflict between the inner 
grace and the outward support is of the esse of Prot- 
estanism. William James was also in warm sjTiipathy 
with Luther who, he thought, ''in his immense, manly 
way . . . stretched the soul's imagination and saved 
theology from puerility." James added that the Re- 
former also invented a morality, as new as romantic 
love in literature, founded on a religious experience of 
despair breaking through the old, pagan pride. 

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher 
and Gasquet, labored fruitfully in the field of the Ref- 
ormation by uncovering new facts, few or none of them 
had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the 
period. Janssen brought to its perfection a new 
method applied to a new field; the field was that of 
Kidturgeschicht^, the method that of letting the sources 
speak for themselves, but naturally only those sources 
agreeable to the author's bias. In this way he repre- 
sented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of 
the German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting 
frost to both culture and morality. Pastor's work. 
Pastor though dense with fresh knowledge, offers no connected 



Catholics 



Janssen 



CATHOLIC INTERPRETATIONS 741 

theoiy. The Reformation, he thinks, was a shock with- 
out parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly the 
religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the 
learned classes and the common people ; in England to 
the caprice of an autocrat. From the learned uproar 
of Denifle's school emerges the explanation of the 
revolt as the ** great sewer" which carried off from the 
church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's 
far finer psychology — characteristically Jesuit — tries 
to cast on Luther the origin of the present destructive 
subjecti\asm. Grisar's proof that ''the modern infidel 
theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated 
way on the Luther of the first period, is suggestive. 

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's Acton 
favorite topics, I cannot find on that subject any new or 
fruitful thought at all in proportion to his vast learn- 
ing. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the 
old Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it 
was merely the product of the wickedness and vagaries 
of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost equally 
blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the 
English Bishop Creighton too easy in his judgment of 
the popes, adding, ''My dogma is not the special ^vicked- 
ness of my ovm spiritual superiors, but the general 
wickedness of men in authority — of Luther and Zwingli 
and Calvin and ^ranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart 
and Henry VIII, of Philip II and Elizabeth, of Crom- 
well and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bos- 
suet and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the 
turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, believing that the 
fundamental characteristic of the period is the belief 
in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that ' ' Lu- 
ther at Worms is the most pregnant and momentous 
fact in our history, ' ' but he confesses himself baffled by 
the problem, which is, to his mind, why Luther did not 
return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up 



742 THE EEFORMATION INTERPRETED 



Anglicans 



Other 
schools 



all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, 
then or later, dropped predestination, and admitted the 
necessity' of good works, the freedom of the will, the 
hierarchical constitution, the authority of tradition, the 
seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Ac- 
ton, the one bar to his return to the church was his 
belief that the pope was Antichrist. 

It is notable that none of the free minds starting 
from Catholicism have been attracted to the Protestant 
camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul and Protes- 
tantism were coming to the end of their reign. Paul 
Sabatier carefully proved that the Modernists owed 
nothing to Luther, and their greatest scholar, Loisy, 
succinctly put the case in the remark, ''We are done 
with partial heresies." 

The Anglicans have joined the Romanists to de- 
nounce as heretics those who rebelled against the 
church which still calls Anglicans heretics. Neville 
Figgis, having snatched from Treitschke the juxtaposi- 
tion ' ' Luther and Machiavelli, ' ' has labored to build up 
around it a theory by which these two men shall ap- 
pear as the chief supports of absolutism and ''divine 
right of kings. ' ' Figgis thinks that with the Reforma- 
tion religion was merely the "performance for passing 
entertainment," but that the state was the "eternal 
treasure." A far more judicious and unprejudiced 
discussion of the same thesis is offered in the works 
of Professor A. F. Pollard. He sees both sides of the 
medal for, if religion had become a subject of politics, 
politics had become matter of religion. He thinks the 
English Reformation was primarily a revolt of the 
laity against the clergy. 

The liberal estimate of the Reformation fashionable 
a hundred years ago has also been revived in an elab- 
orate work of Mackinnon, and is assumed in obiter 
dicta by such eminent historians as A. W. Benn, E. P. 



the Re- 
formation 



CONCLUDING ESTIMATE 743 

Cheyney, C. Borgeaud, H. L. Osgood and Woodrow 
Wilson. Finally, Professor J. H. Kobinson has im- 
proved the old political interpretation current among 
the secular historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. The essence of the Lutheran movement he 
finds in the revolt from the Roman ecclesiastical state. 

§ 5. Concluding Estimate 

The reader will expect me, after having given some 
account of the estimates of others, to make an evalu- 
ation of my own. Of course no view can be final ; mine, 
like that of everyone else, is the expression of an age 
and an environment as well as that of an individual. 

The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the six- Causes of 
teenth-century Social Revolution, was but the conse- 
quence of the operation of antecedent changes in en- 
vironment and habit, intellectual and economic. There 
was the widening and deepening of knowledge, due in 
one aspect to the invention of printing, in the other to 
the geographical and historical discoveries of the fif- 
teenth century and the consequent adumbration of the 
idea of natural law. Even in the later schoolmen, like 
Biel and Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds 
a much stronger rationalism than in the representative 
thinkers of the Middle Ages. The general economic 
antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change in 
the system of production from gild and barter to that 
of money and wages. This produced three secondary 
results, which in turn operated as causes: the rise of 
the moneyed class, individualism, and nationalism. 

All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the re- 
ligious, the political and the intellectual, produced the 
Reformation and its sisters, the Renaissance and the 
'Social Revolution of the sixteenth century. The Re- 
formation — including in that term both the Protestant 
movement and the Catholic reaction — partly occupied 



744 THE EEFORMATION INTERPRETED 



Religious 
aspect 



Parallels to 
the Re- 
formation 



all these fields, but did not monopolize any of them. 
There were some religious, or anti-religious, move- 
ments outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran im- 
pulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the in- 
tellectual and political fields, primarily occupied by 
Renaissance and Revolution. 

(1) The gene felt by many secular historians in the 
treatment of religion is now giving way to the double 
conviction of the importance of the subject and of its 
susceptibility to scientific study. Religion in human 
life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard 
all theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rational- 
ist ^ has remarked, it is usually priests who have freed 
mankind from taboos and superstitions. Indeed, in a 
religious age, no effective attack on the existing church 
is possible save one inspired by piety. 

Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be 
found both in Christian history and in that of other 
religions; they all markedly show the same conse- 
quences of the same causes. The publication of Chris- 
tianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the 
Roman world and its accentuation of faith against the 
ceremonialism of the Jewish church, resembled that of 
Luther's ''gospel." Marcion with his message of 
Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a sec- 
ond-century Reformer. The iconoclasm and national- 
ism of the Emperor Leo furnish striking similarities 
to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started by 
the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics 
Wyclif and IIuss, rehearsed the religious drama of the 
sixteenth century. Many revivals in the Protestant 
church, such as Methodism, were, like the original 
movement, returns to personal piety and biblicism. 
The Old Catholic schism in its repudiation of the papal 
supremacy, and even Modernism, notwithstanding its 

1 S. Reinach: Ciiltes, Mythes et Religions, iv, 467. 



CONCLUDING ESTIMATE 745 

disclaimers, are animated in part by the same motives 
as those inspiring the Reformers. In Judaism the 
Sadducees, in their bibliolatry and in their opposition 
to the traditions dear to tlie Pharisees, were Protes- 
tants ; a later counterpart of the same thing is found in 
the reform the Karaites by Anan ben David. Mo- 
hammed has been a favorite subject for comparison 
with Luther by the Catholics, but in truth, in no dis- 
paraging sense, the proclamation of Islam, with its 
monotheism, emphasis on faith and predestination, was 
very like the Reformation, and so were several later 
reforms within Mohammedanism, including two in the 
sixteenth century. Many parallels could doubtless be 
adduced from the heathen religions, perhaps the most 
striking is the foundation of Sikhism by Luther's con- 
temporary Nanak, who preached monotheism and re- 
volted from the ancient ceremonial and hierarchy of 
caste. 

What is the etiology of religious revolution? The 
principal law governing it is that any marked change 
either in scientific knowledge or in ethical feeling ne- 
cessitates a corresponding alteration in the faith. 
All the great religious innovations of Luther and his 
followers can be explained as an attempt to readjust 
faith to the new culture, partly intellectual, partly 
social, that had gradually developed during the later 
Middle Ages. 

The first shift, and the most important, was that Faith ^ 
from salvation by works to salvation by faith only. ^^^^^ 
The Catholic dogma is that salvation is dependent on 
certain sacraments, grace being bestowed automatic- 
ally {ex opere operato) on all who participate in the 
celebration of the rite without actively opposing its 
effect. Luther not only reduced the number of sacra- 
ments but he entirely changed their character. Not 
they, but the faith of the participant mattered, and , 



746 THE EEFOEMATION INTERPRETED 

this faith was bestowed freely by God, or not at all. 
In this innovation one primary cause was the indi- 
vidnalism of the age ; the sense of the worth of the soul 
or, if one pleases, of the ego. This did not mean sub- 
jectivism, or religious autonomy, for the Reformers 
held passionately to an ideal of objective truth, but it 
did mean that every soul had the right to make its 
personal account with God, without mediation of priest 
or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma 
I was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology 
of the new age. The shift of emphasis from the outer 
to the inner is traceable from the earliest age to the 
present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell 
of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction 
is but the story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The 
Reformation was one phase in this long process from 
the external to the internal. The debit and credit bal- 
ance of outward work and merit was done away, and 
for it was substituted the nobler, or at least more spir- 
itual and less mechanical, idea of disinterested moral- 
ity and unconditioned salvation. The God of Calvin 
may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by 
bribes. 

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the 
esse of religion that it is hard for us to do justice to 
the importance of this change. Really, it is not dogma 
so much as rite and custom that is fundamental. The 
sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval 
Christianity and to most primitive religions. For the 
first time Luther substituted for the sacramental habit, 
or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely ethical cri- 
terion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and 
the categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous 
sola fide. 
Monism The second great change made by Protestantism was 

more intellectual, that from a pluralistic to a monistic 



CONCLUDINa ESTIMATE 747 

standpoint. Far from the conception of natural law, 
the early Protestants did little or nothing to rational- 
ize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but 
they had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy 
to find scandal in the worship of the saints, with its 
attendant train of daily and trivial miracles. To sweep 
away the vast hierarchy of angels and canonized per- 
sons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to 
preach pure monotheism was in the sjiirit of the time 
and is a phenomenon for which many parallels can be 
found. Instructive is the analogy of the contemporary 
trend to absolutism ; neither God nor king any longer 
needed intermediaries. 

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the reli- Political 
gious expression of the current political and economic ^ndeco- 
change. In the first place it reflected and reacted upon aspects 
the growing national self-consciousness, particularly 
of the Teutonic peoples. The revolt from Eome was National- 
in the interests of the state church, and also of Ger- i^"^^"^ 

' 1 eutonism 

manic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at 
the hands of the Northern peoples is strikingly like the 
break-up of the Roman Empire under pressure from 
their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman 
church practically coincided with the boundaries of 
the Empire. The apparent exception of England 
proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman civilization 
was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth 
and following centuries. 

That the Reformation strengthened the state was in- 
evitable, for there was no practical alternative to put- 
ting the final authority in spiritual matters, after the 
pope had been ejected, into the hands of the civil gov- 
ernment. Congregationalism was tried and failed as 
tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation 
was really responsible for the new despotism and the 
divine right of kings, is clear from a comparison with 



748 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

the Greek church and the Turkish Empire. In both, 
the same forces which produced the state churches of 
Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, 
a bigoted Sunnite, after putting down the Shi 'ite her- 
esy, induced the last caliph of the Abbasid dynasty to 
surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet ; there- 
after he and his successors were caliphs as well as 
sultans. In Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, 
in 1547, head of the national church. 
Capitalism Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic 
revolution in that its ethics are, far more than those 
of Catholicism, oriented by a reference to this world. 
The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude, mortifica- 
tion of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under 
the sun of a new prosperity. In its light men began 
to realize the ethical value of this life, of marriage, of 
children, of daily labor and of success and prosperity. 
It was just in this work that Protestantism came to see 
its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. 
The man at the plough, the maid with the broom, said 
Luther, are doing God better service than does the 
praying, self -tormenting monk. 

Moreover, the accentuation of the virtues of thrift 
and industry, which made capitalism and Calvinism 
allies, but reflected the standards natural to the bour- 
( geois class. It was by the might of the merchants and 
their money that the Reformation triumphed; con- 
versely they benefited both by the spoils of the church 
and by the abolition of a privileged class. Luther 
stated that there was no difference between priest and 
layman; some men were called to preach, others to 
make shoes, but — and this is his own illustration — the 
one vocation is no more spiritual than the other. No 
longer necessary as a mediator and dispenser of sacra- 
mental grace, the Protestant clergyman sank inevi- 
tably to the same level as his neighbors. 



CONCLUDING ESTIMATE 



749 



Individ- 
ualism 



(3) In its relation to the Renaissance and to modern inteUectual 
thought the Eeformation solved, in its way, two prob- ^^^^^ 
lenis, or one problem, that of authority, in two forms. 
Though anything but consciously rational in their pur- 
pose, the innovating leaders did assert, at least for 
themselves, the right of private judgment. Appealing 
from indulgence-seller to pope, from pope to council, 
from council to the Bible and (in Luther's own words) 
from the Bible to Christ, the Reformers finally came to 
their own conscience as the supreme court. Trying to 
deny to others the very rights they had fought to se- 
cure for themselves, yet their example operated more 
powerfully than their arguments, even when these were 
made of ropes and of thumb-screws. The delicate bal- 
ance of faith was overthrown and it was put into a con- 
dition of unstable equilibrium; the avalanche, started 
by ever so gentle a push, swept onward until it buried 
the men who tried to stop it half way. Dogma slowly 
narrowing down from precedent to precedent had its 
logical, though unintended, outcome in complete religi- 
ous autonomy, yes, in infidelity and ske^^ticism. 

Protestantism has been represented now as the ally, Vulgariza 
now as the enemy of humanism. Consciously it was 
neither. Eatlier, it was the vulgarization of the Re- 
naissance; it transformed, adapted, and popularized 
many of the ideas originated by its rival. It is easy 
to see now that the future lay rather outside of both 
churches than in either of them, if we look only for 
direct descent. Columbus burst the bounds of the 
world, Copernicus those of the universe; Luther only 
broke his vows. But the point is that the repudiation 
of religious vows was the hardest to do at that time, 
a feat infinitely more impressive to the masses than 
either of the former. It was just here that the re- 
ligious movement became a great solvent of conserv- 
atism; it made the masses think, passionately if not 



tion of the 
Renais- 
sance 



750 THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 



The Re- 
formation 
a step 
forward 



deeply, on their own beliefs. It broke the cake of 
custom and made way for greater emancipations than 
its own. It was the logic of events that, whereas the 
/Renaissance gave freedom of thought to the cultivated 
few, the Reformation finally resulted in tolerance for 
the masses. Logically also, even while it feared and 
hated philosophy in the great thinkers and scientists, 
it advocated education, up to a certain point, for the 
masses. 

In summary, if the Reformation is judged with his- 
torical imagination, it does not appear to be primarily 
a reaction. That it should be such is both a priori im- 
probable and unsupported by the facts. The Reforma- 
tion did not give our answer to the many problems it 
was called upon to face ; nevertheless it gave the solu- 
tion demanded and accepted by the time, and therefore 
historically the valid solution. With all its limitations 
it was, fundamentally, a step forward and not the re- 
turn to an earlier standpoint, either to that of primitive 
Christianity, as the Reformers themselves claimed, or 
to the dark ages, as has been latterly asserted. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 
PRELIMINARY 

1. Unpublished Sources. 

The amount of important unpublished documents on the 
Reformation, though still large, is much smaller than that of 
printed sources, and the value of these manuscripts is less 
than that of those which have been published. It is no pur- 
pose of this bibliography to furnish a guide to archives. 

Though the quantity of unpublished material that I have 
used has been small, it has proved unexpectedly rich. In 
order to avoid repetition in each following chapter, I will 
here summarize manuscript material used (most of it for the 
first time), which is either still unpublished or is in course of 
publication by myself. See Luther's Correspondence, transl. 
and ed. by Preserved Smith and C. M. Jacobs, 1913 ff ; Eng- 
lish Historical Review, July 1919 ; Scottish Historical Re- 
view, Jan. 1919 ; Harvard Theological Review, April 1919 ; 
The N. Y. Nation, various dates 1919. 

From the Bodleian Library, I have secured a copy of an 
unpublished letter and other fragments of Luther, press mark, 
Montagu d. 20, fol. 225, and Aiict. Z. ii, 2. 

From the British Museum I have had diplomatic corre- 
spondence of Robert Barnes, Cotton MSS., Vitellius B XXI, 
foil. 120 ff. ; a letter of Albinianus Tretius to Luther, Add. 
MS. 19, 959, fol. 4b ff ; and a portion of John Foxe's Collec- 
tion of Letters and Papers, Harleian MS 419, fol. 125. 

From the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, 
collection of autographs made by Ferdinand J. Dreer, unpub- 
lished and hitherto unused letters of Erasmus, James VI of 
Scotland (2), Leo X, Hedio, Farel to Calvin, Forster, Melanch- 
thon, Charles V, Albrecht of Mansfeld, Henry VIII, Francis I 
(3), Catherine de' Medici, Grynaeus, Viglius van Zuichem, 
Alphonso d'Este, Philip IMarnix, Camden, Tasso, Machiavelli, 
Pius IV, Vassari, Borromeo, Alesandro Ottavio de' Medici 
(afterwards Leo XI), Clement VIII, Sarpi, Emperor Ferd- 
inand, William of Nassau (1559), Maximilian III, Paul Eber 

751 



752 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(2), Hudolph II, Henry III, Philip II, Emanuel Philibert, 
Henry IV, Scaliger, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert Dudley 
(Leicester), Filippo Strozzi, and others. 

From Wellesley College a patent of Charles V., dated 
Worms, March 6, 1521, granting mining rights to the Count 
of Belalcazar. Unpublished. 

From the American Hispanic Society of New York un- 
published letter of Henry IV of France to Du Pont, on his 
conversion, and letter of Henry VII of England to Ferdi- 
nand of Aragon. 

2. General "Works 

Encyclopaedia Britannica}'^ 1910-1. (Many valuable arti- 
cles of a thoroughly scientific character). 

The New International EncyclopcEdia, 1915f. (Equally valu- 
able). 

Bealencyklopddie filr protestantische Theologie und Eirche.^ 
24 vols. Leipzig. 1896-1913. (Indispensable to the 
student of Church History; The Schaff-Herzog Encyclo- 
pedia of Religious Knowledge, 12 vols., 1908 ff, though 
in part based on this, is far less valuable for the present 
subject). 

Wetzer und Welte: Kirchefilexikon oder Encyklopddie der 
JcathoHischen Theologie und ihrer Hillfswissenschaften. 
Zweite Auflage von J. Card. Hergenrother und F. 
Kaulen. Freiburg im Breisgau. 1880-1901. 12 vols. 
(Valuable). 

Die Religion in Geischichte und Gegenwart, hg. von H. Gunkel, 
0. Scheel, F. M. Schiele. 5 vols. 1909-13. 

The Cambridge Modern History, planned by Lord Acton, 
edited by A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes. 
London and New York. 1902 ff. Vol. 1. The Renais- 
samce. 1902. Vol. 2. The Reforination. 1904. Vol. 
3. The Wars of Religion. 1905. Vol. 13. Tables and 
Index. 1911. Vol. 14. Maps. 1912. (A standard 
co-operative work, with full bibliographies). 

Weltgeschichte, hg.v.J. von Pflugk-Harttung : Das Religiose 
Zeit alter, 1500-1650. Berlin. 1907. (A co-operative 
work, written by masters of their subjects in popular 
style. Profusely illustrated). 

E. Lavisse et A. Rambaud: Histoire generate du IV e siecle 
a nos jours. Tome IV Renaissance et reforme, les nou- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 753 

veaux mondes 1492-1559. 1894. Tome V. Les guerres 

de religion 1559-1648. 1895. 
R. L. Poole: Historical Atlas of Modern Europe. 1902. 
W. R. Shepherd: Historical Atlas. 1911. 
Ramsay Muir: Hammond's New Historical Atlas for 

Students. 1914. 
A list of general histories of the Reformation will be found 
in the bibliography to the last chapter. 

An excellent introduction to the bibliography of the public 
documents of all countries will be found in the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, s.v. ' ' Record, ' ' 

CHAPTER I. THE OLD AND THE NEW 
§ 1. The World 

On economic changes see bibliography to chapter xi; on 

exploration, chapter ix; on universities, chapter xiii, 3. On 

printing : 

J. Janssen: A History of the German People from the Close 
of the Middle Ages, transl. by M. A. Mitchell and A. M. 
Christie. 2d English ed. 16 volumes. 1905-1(>. 

A. W. Pollard: Fine Books. 1912. 

T. L. De Vinne: The hivention of Printing. 1878. 

Veroffe7itlichuvgen dcr Gutenherg-Gesellschaft. 1901 ff. 

H. Meisner und J. Luther: Die Erfindung der Buchdrucker- 
kunst. 1900. 

Article ''Typography'' in Encyclopaedia Britamiica. (The 
author defends the now untenable thesis that printing 
originated in Holland, though the numerous and valua- 
ble data given by himself point clearly to Mayence as 
the cradle of the art). 

§§2 and 3 The Church, Causes of the Reformation. 

Sources. 

C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und der 

romischen Katholizismus.^ 1911. (Convenient and 

scholarly; indispensable to any one who has not a large 

library at command). 
The Missal, compiled from the Missale Romanum. 1913. 
The Priest's New Ritual, compiled by P. Griffith. 1902. 

(The rites of the Roman Church, except the Mass, partly 

in Latin, partly in English). 



754 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated into 
English by J. Donovan. 1829. 

Corpus Juris Canonici, post curas A. L. E/ichteri instruxit 
Aemilius Friedberg. 2 vols. 1879-81. 

Codex Juris Canonici, Pii X jussu digestus, Benedicti XV 
auctoritate promulgatus. 1918. 

Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologice. Many editions; the 
best, with a conunentary by Cardinal Cajetan (1469- 
1534) in Opera Omnia, iussu impensaque Leonis XIII 
PP. vols. 4-10. 1882 ff. 

The Summa theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by 
the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1911 ff. 
(In course of publication, as yet, 6 vols). 

"Von der Hardt: Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiense Con- 
silium. 6 vols. 1700. 

D. Mansi: Conciliorum nova et ampUssima collectio. Vols. 

27-32. Venice. 1784 ff. (Identical reprint, Paris, 

1902). 
Most of the best literature of the 14th and 15th centuries, 

e.g., the works of Chaucer, Langland, Boccaccio and Pe- 

trach. 
Special works of ecclesiastical writers, humanists, nationalists 

and heretics quoted below. 
V. Hasak: Der christliche Glaube des deutschen Volkes ieim 

Schlusse des Mittelalters. 1868. (A collection of works 

of popular edification prior to Luther). 
G. Berbig: "Die erste kursdchsische Visitation im Ortland 

Franken." Archiv filr Beformationsgeschichte, iii. 336- 

402; iv. 370-408. 1905-6. 

Treatises. 

E. Friedberg: Lehrhuch des katholischen und evangelischen 

Kirchenrechts.^ Leipzig. 1903. 

L. Pastor: History of the Popes from the close of the Mid- 
dle Ages. English translation,^ vols. 1-6 edited by An- 
trobus, vols. 7-12 edited by R. Kerr. 1899 f£. (Ex- 
haustive, brilliantly written. Catholic, a little one-sided). 

Mandel Creighton: A History of the Papacy 1378-1527. 6 
vols. 189? ff. (Good, but in large part superseded by 
Pastor). 

F. Gregorovius: A History of Rome in the Middle Ages, 

translated by A. Hamilton, vols. 7 and 8. 1900. 
(Brilliant). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 755 

Schaff's History of the Christian Church. Vol. 5, part 2. 

The Middle Ages. 129J^1517, by D. S. Schaff. 1910. 

(A scholarly summary, warmly Protestant). 
J. Schnitzer: Quellcn und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sa- 

vonarolas. 3 vols. 1902-4. 
J. Schnitzer: Savonarola im Streite mit seinem Orden und 

scinem Kloster. 1914. 
H. Lucas: Fra Girolamo Savonarola." 1906. 
H. C. Lea: An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy.^ 2 

vols. 1907. (Lea's valuable works evince a marvelously 

wide reading in the sources, but are slightly marred by 

an insufficient use of modern scholarship). 
H. C. Lea: A History of Auricular Confession and Indul- 
gences in the Latin Church. 3 vols. 1896. 
Aloys Schulte: Die Fugger in Rom, 1495-1523. 2 vols. 

Leipzig. 1904. (Describes the financial methods of the 

church. The second volume consists of documents). 
E. Rodocanachi: Rome au temps de Jules II et de Leon X. 

1912. 
H. Bbhmer: Luthers Romfahrt. 1914. (The latter part of 

this work gives a dark picture of the corruption of Rome 

at the beginning of the 16th century). 

§ 4. The Mystics 

Sources. 
W. K. Inge: Life, Light and Love. 1904. (Selections from 

Eckart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck, etc.). 
H. Denifle: '^M. Eckeharts lateinische Schriften und die 

Grundanschauung seiner Lehre." Archiv fiXr Literatur- 

U72d Sprachgeschichte. ii. 416-652. 
Meister Eckeharts Schriften und Predigten aus dem Mittel- 

hochdeutschen iibersetzt von H. Buttner. 2 vols. 1912. 
H. Seuses Deutsche Schriften iibertragen von W. Lehmann. 

2 vols. 1914. 
J. Taulers Predigten, iibertragen von W. Lehmann. 2 vols. 

1914. 
Thomas k Kempis: imitatio Christi. (So many editions and 

translations of this celebrated work that it is hardly 

necessary to specify one). 
The German Theology, translated by Susannah Winkworth. 

1854. 



756 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Treatises. 
Kuno Francke: '' Medieval German Mysticism." Harvard 

Theological Review, Jan., 1912. 
G. Siedel: Die Mystik Taulers. 1911. 
M. Windstosser : Etude sur la 'Theologie germanique.' 

1912. 
W. Preger: Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter. 

3 vols. 1874-93. 
History and Life of the Bev. John Tauler, with 25 sermons, 

translated by Susannah Winkworth. 1858, 
M. Maeterlinck: Riiyshroeck and the Mystics, with selections 

from Ruysbroeek, translated by J. T. Stoddard. 1894. 
J. E. G. de Montmorency: Thomas a Kempis, his Age and 

his Book. 1906. 
A. R. Burr: Religious Confessions and Confessants. 1914. 

(The best psychological study of mysticism). 

§ 5. Pre-Reformers 

Sources. 
J. Wyclif's Select English Works, ed. by T. Arnold. 1869- 

71. 3 vols. 
J. Wyclif's English Works hitherto unprinfed, ed. F. 
Matthew. 1880. 

F. Palacky : Documenta Magistri J. Hus. 1869. 

The Letters of John Huss, translated by H. B. Workman and 

R. M. Pope. 1904. 
"Wyclif's Latin Works have been edited in many volumes by 

the Wyclif Society of London, the last volume being 

the Opera minora, 1913. 
John Huss: The Church, translated by D. S. Schaff. 1915. 

Treatises. 
H. C. Lea : A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. 
3 vols. 1888. 

G. M. Trevelyan : England in the Age of Wyclif ^. 1899. 
F. A. Gasquet: The Eve of the Reformation-. 1905. 

F. Palacky : Geschichte von Bohmen.^ 1864 ff. 5 vols. 

J. H. Wylie : The Council of Constance to the Death of John 

Hus. 1900. 
H. B. Workman: The Dawn of the Reformation. The Age 

of Hus. 1902. 
Count F. Liitzow: The Hussite Wars. 1914. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 757 

Count F. Liitzow. The Life and Times of Master John Hus. 
1909. 

D. S. Schaff : The Life of John Hus. 1915. 

§ 6. Nationalizing the Churches 

Most of the bibliography in this chapter is given below, in 

the chapters on Germany, England and France. 
Freher et Struvius. Eerum Germa/n icarum Scriptores. 

(1717.) pp. 676-1704: "Gravamina Germanicae Na- 

tionis ... ad C^esarem Maximilianum contra Sedem 

Romanam. ' ' 
C. G. F. Walcli: Monximenta medii aevi. (1757.) pp. 101- 

110. "Gravamina nationis Germanics adversus curiam 

Romanam, tempore Nieolai V Papfe. " 
B. Gebhardt: Die Gravamina der deutschen Nation gegen den 

romischen Hof. 1895. 
Documents illustrative of English Church History, compiled 

by Henry Gee and W. J. Hardy. 1896. 
A. Werminghoff : Geschichte der Kirchenverfassung Deutsch- 

lands im Mittelalter. Band I.^ 1913. 
A. Stormann : Die Stddtischen Gravamina gegen den Klerus. 

1916. 

§ 7, The Humanists 

Sources. 

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Ralph Robinson's transla- 
tion, with Roper's Life of More and some of his letters. 
Edited by G. Sampson and A. Guthkelch, With Latin 
Text of the Utopia. 1910. (Bohn's Libraries). 

Der Briefwechsel des Mutianus Bufus, bearbeitet von C. 
Krause. 1885. 

J. Beuchlins Brieftvcchsel, hg. von L. Geiger. 1875. 

E. Bocking: Hutteni Opera. 1859-66. 5 vols. 

Epistolcp Ohscurorum Virorxnn: The Latin Text with an 
English translation, Notes and an Historical Introduc- 
tion by F. G. Stokes. 1909. 

Des. Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, curavit J. Clericus. 
1703-6. 10 vols. 

Des. Erasmi Roterodami Opus Epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen. 
1906 ff. (A wonderful edition of the letters, in course 
of publication. As yet 8 vols). 

The Colloquies of Des. Erasmus, translated by N. Bailey, ed. 
by E. Johnson. 1900. 3 vols. 



758 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Praise of Folly. Written by Erasmus 1509 and trans- 
lated by John Wilson 1668, edited by Mrs. P. S. Allen. 
1913. 

The Epistles of Erasmus, translated by F. M, Nichols. 1901- 
18. 3 vols. (To 1519). 

The Ship of Fools, translated by Alexander Barclay. 2 vols. 
1874. (Sebastian Brandt's Narrenschiff in the old trans- 
lation). 

Treatises. 
P. Monnier: Le Quattrocento. 2 vols. 1908. (Work of a 

high order). 
L. Geiger: Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und 

Deutschland. 1882. (In Oncken's Series). 2d ed. 

1899. 
J. Burckhardt: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. 20. 

Auflage von L. Geiger. Berlin. 1919. (Almost a 

classic). 
P. Villari : Niccold Machiavelli and His Times, translated by 

Mrs. Villari \ 4 vols. 1891. 
W. H. Hutten: Sir Thomas More. 1900. 
J. A. Froude: The Life and Letters of Erasmus. London. 

1895. (Charmingly written, but marred by gross care- 
lessness). 
E. Emerton: Erasmus. New York. 1900. 
G. V. Jourdan: The Movement towards Catholic Reform in 

the early XVI Century. 1914. 
A. Humbert: Les Origines de la Theologie moderne. Paris. 

1911. (Brilliant). 
A. Renaudet: Prereforme et Humanisme a Paris 1494-1517. 

1916. 

CHAPTER II. GERMANY 

General 

List of References lOn the History of the Reformation in Ger- 
many, ed. by G. L. Kieffer, W. AV. Rockwell and 0. H. 
Pannkoke, 1917. 

Dalilmann-Waitz : Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte.^ 
1912. 

G. Wolf: Quellenkunde der deutschen Reformationsge- 
schichte. 2 vols. 1915-16. 

A. Morel-Fatio : Eistoriographie de Charles-Quint. Pt. 1. 
1913. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 759 

B. J. Kidd: Documents illustrative of the Continental Be- 

formation. 1911. 
T. M. Lindsay: A History of the Reformation. Vol. 1, In 

Germany. 1906. 
J. Janssen: op. cit. 

K. lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte, vols, 4 and 5. 1894. 
T. Brieger: Die Reformation. (In Pflugk-IIarttung's Welt- 

geschichte: Das religiose Zeitalter 1500-1650. 1907; 

also printed separatelj^ in enlarged form). 
G. Mentz: Deutsche Geschichte 1493-1648. 1913. (The 

best purely political summary). 
M. de Foronda y Aguilera: Estaneias y viajes del Empera- 

dor Carlos V, desde el dia de su nacimiento hasta el de su 

muerte. 1914. 



§ 1. Luther 

Bibliography in Catalogue of the British Museum. 

Dr. Martin Luther's Werke. Kritisehe Gesamtausgabe, von 
Knaake und Andern. Weimar. 1883 ff. (The stand- 
ard edition of the Reformer's writings, in course of pub- 
lication, approaching completion. As yet have appeared 
more than fifty volumes of the Works, and, separately 
numbered: Die Deutsche Bibel, 4 vols., and Tischreden, 
4 vols.). 

Dr. Martin Luther's Briefwechsel, bearbeitet von E. L. En- 
ders (vols. 12 ff. fortgesetzt von G. Kawerau). 1884 ff. 
(In course of publication; as yet 17 volumes). 

Luther's Brief e, herausgegeben von W. L. M. de Wette. 6 
vols. 1825-56. 

Luther's Primary Works , translated by H. Wace and C. A. 
Buchheim. 1896. 

The Works of Martin Luther, translated and edited by W. 
A. Lambert, J. J. Schindel, A. T. W. Steinhaeuser, A. 
L. Steimle and C. M. Jacobs. 1915 ff. (To be complete 
in ten volumes ; as yet 2) . 

Luther's Correspo7idence and other Contemporary Letters, 
translated and edited by Preserved Smith. Vol. I, 1913. 
Vol. II, in collaboration with C. M. Jacobs, 1918. 

Conversations with Luther, Selections from the Table Talk, 
translated and edited by Preserved Smith and H. P. Gall- 
inger. 1915. 



760 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Melanchthonis Opera, ed. Bretschneider und Bindseil. 1834 
ff. In Corpus Keforniatorum vols, i-xxviii. 

J. Kostlin: Martin Luther, fiinfte Auflage besorgt von G. 
Kawerau, 2 vols. 1903. (The standard biography. 
The English translation made from, the edition of 1883 
in no vs^ise represents the scholarship of the last edition). 

A. Hausrath: Luther's Lehen, neue Auflage von H. von Schu- 
bert. 1914. (Excellent). 

H. G-risar: Luther. English translation by F. M. Lamond. 
1913 ff. (Six volumes, representing the German three. 
A learned, somewhat amorphous work, from the Catholic 
standpoint, but not unfair). 

H. Denifle : Luther und Lutherthum in der ersten Entwick- 
lungK 3 vols. 1904 ff. (G. P. Gooch calls " Denifle 's 
eight hundred pages hurled at the memory of the Re- 
former among the most repulsive books in historical lit- 
erature"; nevertheless the author is so wonderfully 
learned that much may be acquired from him). 

A. C. McGiffert: Martin Luther, the Man and his Work. 
1911. 

Preserved Smith: The Life and Letters of Martin Luther^. 
1914. 

0. Scheel: Martin Luther, vom Katholizismus zur Reforma- 
tion.'^ 2 vols. 1917. (Detailed study of Luther until 
1517. Warmly Protestant). 

W. W. Rockwell: Die Doppelehe des Landgrafen Philipp von 
Hessen. 1904. (Work of a high order). 

§§ 2-5. The Revolution 

Deutsche Beichstagsakten unter Karl V, herausgegeben von 

A. Kluckhohn and A. Wrede. 1893 ff. (Four volumes 

to 1524 have appeared). 
Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschla7id nehst ergdnzenden Akten- 

stiicken, herausgegeben durch das Konigliche Preussische 

Institut in Rom. Erste Abtheilung 1533-59. 1892^ ff. 

(As yet have appeared vols. 1-6, 8-12). 
Emil Sehling: Die Evangelischen Kirchenordungen des XVI 

Jahrhunderts. 5 vols. 1902-13. 
E. Armstrong: The Emperor Charles V^. 2 vols. 1910. 
■Christopher Hare : A Great Emperor. 1917. (Popular). 
0. Clemen: Flugschriften aus der Reformationszeit. 4 vols. 

1904-10. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 761 

0. Schade: Satiren und Pasquille aus der Reformationszeit.^ 

3 vols. 1863. 
H. Barge: Der deutsche Bauernkrieg in zeifgenossischen 

Quellenzeugnissen. 2 vols. (No date, published about 

1914. A small and cheap selection from the sources 

turned into modern German). 
J. S. Scliapiro: Social Reform and the Reformation. 1909. 

(Gives some of the texts and a good treatment of the 

popular movement). 

E. Belfort Bax: The Peasants' War in Germany. 1889. 

(Based chiefly on Janssen, and unscholarly, but worth 

mentioning considering the paucity of English works). 

See also articles Carlstadt, Karlstadt, T. Miinzer, Sick- 

ingen, etc. in the Encyclopaedia of Relig-ious Knowledge 

and other works of reference. 
W. Stolze: Der deutsche Bauernkrieg. 1908. 
P. Wappler: Die Tduferhewegung in Thilringen 1526-84. 

1913. 
B. Bax: Rise and Fall of the Anahaptists. 1903. 
P. Wappler: Die Stellung Kursachsens und Landgraf Phil- 

ipps von Hessen zur Tauferbewegung. 1910. 

F. W. Schirrmacher : Brief e und Akten zur Geschicte des Re- 

ligionsgc.sprdches zu Marburg 1529 und des Reichstages 
zii Augsburg, 1530. 1876. 

H. von Schubert: Bekenntnisbildung und Religionspolitik 
1529-30. 1910. 

"W. Gussmann : Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des 
Augsburgischen Glaubensbekenntnises. Die Ratschlage 
der evangelischen Reichsstande zum Reichstag zu Augs- 
burg. 3 vols. 1911. 

Politische Korrespondenz des Herzog und KurfUrst Moritz 

von Sachsen, hg. v. E. Brandenburg. 2 vols, (as yet), 

1900, 1904. 
S. Cardauns: Zur Geschichte der Kirchlichen Unions — und 

Reformbestrebungen 1538-42. 1910. 
P. Heidrich : Karl V und die deutschen Protestanten am Vor- 

ahend des Schmalkaldischen Krieges. 2 vols. 1911-12. 

G. Mentz: Johann Friedrich, vol. 3, 1908. 

See also the works cited above by Annstrong, Pflugk-Hart- 
tung, Janssen, Pastor, The Cambridge Modern History, and 
documents in Kidd. 



762 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

§ 6. Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary 

Documents in Kidd, and treatment in The Cambridge 
Modern History. 
Acta Pontificum Danica, Band VI 1513-36. Udgivet af A. 

Kranip og J. Lindbaek. 1915. 
C. F. Allen: Histoire de Danemark, traduite par E. Beauvois. 

2 vols. 1878. 
P. B. Watson : The Swed/ish Revolution under Giistavus Vasa. 

1889. 
Specimen diplomatarii norvagici . . . ah vetustiorihus inde 

temporihus usque ad finem seculi XVI. Ved Gr. Fou- 

gner Lundh. 1828. 
J. Lund: Histoire de Norvege . . . traduite par G. Moch. 

1899. 
Norges historic, fremstillet for det nor she folk af A. Bugge, 

E. Hertzberg, 0. A. Johnsen, Yngvar Nielsen, J. E. Sars, 

A. Taranger. 1912. 
C. Zivier: Neuere Geschichte Polens. Band I. 1506-72. 

1915. 
T. Wotschke: Geschichte der Reformation in Polen. 1911. 
A. Berga. Pierre Skarga 1536-1612 . Etude sur la Pologne 

du XVIe siecle et le Protestantisme polonais. 1916. 
F. E. Wiitton: A History of Poland. 1917. (Popular). 

CHAPTER III. 
SWITZERLAND 
§ 1. Zwingli 

Ulrichi Zwinglii opera ed. Sehuler und Sehulthess, 8 vols. 

1828-42. 
Ulrich ZwingUs Werke, hg. von Egli, Finsler und Kohler, 

1904 ff. (Corpus Reformatorum, vols. 88 ff). As yet, 

vols, i, ii, iii, vii. viii. 
Ulrich ZwingU's Selected Works, translated and edited by S. 

M. Jackson. 1901. 
The Latin Works and Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli, 

ed. S. M. Jackson, vol. i, 1912. 
Vadianische Brief sammlung , hg. von E. Arbenz und H. Wart- 

mann, 1890-1913. 7 vols, and 6 supplements. 
Der Brief wechsel der Brilder Amhrosius und Thomas Blaurer, 

hg. von T. Schiess, 3 vols. 1908-12. 
Johannes Kesslers Sahbata, hg. von E. Egli and R. Schoch. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 763 

1902. (Reliable source for the Swiss Reformation 1519- 

39). 
Bocumcnis in Kkld. 

S. M. Jackson: Huldreich ZidingJi. 1900. 
W. Kohler: ''Zwingli" in Pfliigk-Harttung's 7m Morgenrot 

der Reformation, 1912. 

E. Egli: Schiveizerische Beformationsgesckichte. Band I, 

1519-25. 1910. 

F. Humbel: Ulrich Zwingli und seine Reformation im Spie- 

gel der gleichzeitigen Schweizerischen volkstilmlichen Dit- 

cratur. 1913. 
Cambridge Modern History, Lindsay, etc. 
H. Earth: Bibliographie der Schweizer Geschichte. 3 vols. 

1914 f. 
Bibliography in G. "Wolf, Quellenkunde, vol. 2. 
On Jetzer see Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, s.v. 

' ' Jetzer Prozess, ' ' and R. Reuss : ' ' Le Proces des Domin- 

icains de Berne," Revue de VHistoire des Religions, 1905, 

237 ff. 
P. Burckhardt: H. Zwingli. 1918. 
W. Kohler: Ulrich Zwingli.'' 1917. 
Ulrich Zwingli: Zum Geddchtnis der Zilrcher Reformation, 

1519-1919, ed. H. Escher, 1919. (Sumptuous and valu- 
able). 
Amtliche Sammhmg der dlteren eidgenossischen Ahschiede, 

Abt. 3 und 4. 1861 ff. 
J. Strickler: Aktensammlung zur Schweizer Reformations- 

geschichte. 1878. 
J. Dierauer: Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossen- 

schaft. Band HI. 1907. 
Hadorn: Kirchengeschichte der reform. Schweiz. 1907. 

G. Tobler: Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Berner Re- 

formation. 1918. 
E. Egli: Analecta Reformatoria. 2 vols. 1899-1901. 

§ 2. Calvin 

Bibliography in Wolf : Quellenkunde, ii. 

Correspondance des Reformateurs dans les Pays de langue 

franqaise ^, pub. par A. L. Herminjard. 9 vols. 1878 ff. 
Calvirii Opera omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, E. Reuss, 59 

vols. 1866 ff. (Corpus Reformatorum vols. 29-87). 
John Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans- 



764 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

lated by J. Allen. Ed. by B. B. Warfield. 2 vols. 1909., 
The Letters of John Calvin, compiled by J. Bonnet, translated' 

from the original Latin and French. 4 vols. 1858. 
J. Calvin: Institution de la religion chrestienne, reimprimee, 

sous la direction d' A. Lefranc par H. Chatelain et J. 

Pannir. 1911. 
The Life of John Calvin &y Theodore Beza, translated by H. 

Beveridge. 1909, 
A. Lang : Johann Calvin. 1909. 
W. Walker: J. Calvin. 1906. (Best biography). 
H. Y. Reyburn: John Calvin. 1914. 

J. Doumergue: Jean Calvin. As yet 5 vols. 1899-1917. 
E. Knodt: Die Bedeutimg Calvins und Calvinismus filr die 

protestantische Welt. 1913. (Extensive bibliography 

and review of recent works). 

E. Troeltsch: ''Calvin," Hihhert Journal, viii, 102 ff. 

T. C. Hall: "Was Calvin a Reformer or a Reactionary?" 
Hihhert JourTial, vi, 171 ff. 

Etienne Giran: Sehastien Castellion. 1913. (Severe judg- 
ment of Calvin from the liberal Protestant standpoint). 

Allan Menzies: The Theology of Calvin. 1915. 

H. D. Foster: Calvin's programme for a Puritan State in 
Geneva 1536-41. 1908. 

F. Brunetiere: "L'oeuvre litteraire de Calvin." Bevue des 

Deux Mondes, 4 serie, clxi, pp. 898 ff. (1900). 
E. lobstein: Kalvin und Montaigne. 1909. 

CHAPTER IV 

FRANCE 

Sources. 
A. Molinier, H. Hauser, E. Bourgeois (et autres) : Les Sources 

de Vhistoire de France depuis les origines jusqu'en 1815. 

Deuxieme Partie. Le XVIe siecle, 149^1610, par. II. 

Hauser. 4 vols. 1906-1915. (Valuable, critical bibliog- 
raphy of sources). 
Recueil generale des anciennes lois fran^aises, par Isambert, 

Decrusy, Armet. Tomes 12-15 (1514-1610). 1826 ff. 
OrdonnaTices des rois de France. Regne de Francois I. 10 

vols. 1902-8. 
Michel de L'Hopital: (Euvres completes, ed. Dufey. 4 vols. 

1824-5. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 765 

Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris sous le regne de Frangois lev 

(1515-36), ed. par L. Lalanne. 1854. 
Commentaires de Blaise de Monhic, ed. P. Courtreault. 3 

vols. 1911 ff. 
Memoires-journaux du due de Guise 1547-61, ed. Michaud et 

Poujoulat. 1839. 
(Euvres completes de Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Bran- 
tome, ed. par L. Lalanne, 11 vols. 1864-82. 
Histoire Ecclesiastique des Eglises reformees au Royaume de 

France, ed. G. Baum et E. Cunitz, 3 vols. 1883-9. 

(This history first appeared anonymously in 1580 in 3 

vols. The place of publication is given as Antwerp, but 

probably it was really Geneva. The author has been 

thought by many to be Theodore Beza. 
Mcmoires of the Duke of Sully. English translation in 

Bohn's Library. 3 vols. No date. 
Crespin : Histoire des martyrs, persecutes et mis a mort pour 

la vet^ite de V Evangile. Ed. of 1619. 
Mfmoires de Martin et de Guillaume du Bellay, ed. par V. L. 

Bourilly et F. Vindry. 4 vols. 1908-1920. 
Correspondance des Reformateurs dans les pays de langue 

frangaise, pub. par A. L, Herminjard. 9 vols. 1878 ff. 
J. Fraikin: Nonciatures de la France. Vol. i, Clement VII, 

1906. 
Lettres de Catherine de Medicis, publiees par H. de la Ferriere 

et B. de Puchesse. 10 vols. Paris. 1880-1909. 
Catalogue generale de la Bibliotheque Nationale. Actes Roy- 

aux. Vol. i, 1910. 

Literature. 

A. M. Whitehead: Gaspard de Coligny. 1904. 

Louis BatifFol: The Century of the Re^iaissance, translated 
from the French by E. F. Buckley, with an introduction 
by J. E. C. Bodley. 1916. 

J. W. Thompson: The Wars of Religion in France 1559-76. 
]909. 

E. Lavisse : Histoire de France. Tome Cinquieme. I. Les 
guerres d' Italic. La France sous Charles VIII, Louis 
XII et Francois I, par H. Lemonnier. 1903. II. La 
lutte centre la maison dAutriche. La France sous 
Henri II, par H. Lemonnier. 1904. Tome Sixieme. I. 
La Reforme et la Ligue. L'Edit de Nantes (1559-98), 
par J. H. Mariejol. 1904. (Standard work). 



766 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

H. M. Baird: The Rise of the Huguenots in France, 2 vols. 
1879. 

H. M. Baird : The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre. 2 vols. 
1886. 

H.N.Williams: Henrill. 1910. 

E. Marcks: Oaspard von Coligny: sein Leben und das 
Frankreieh seiner Zeit. 1892. (Excellent, only Volume 
I, taking Coligny to 1560, has appeared). 

P. Imbart de la Tour: Les Origines de la Reforme. I. La 
France Moderne. 1905. II. L'Eglise Catholique et la 
Crise de la Renaissance. 1909. III. I 'Evangelisme 
(1521-38). 1914. (Excellent work, social and cultural 
rather than political). 

E. Sichel: Catherine de' Medici and the French Reforma- 
tion. 1905. 

E. Sichel: The Later Years of Catherine de' Medici. 1908. 

C. E. du Boulay: Historia Vniversitatis Parisiensis. Tomus 
VI. 1673. 

J. Michelet: Histoire de France. Vols. 8-10. First edition 
1855 ff. (A beautiful book ; though naturally superseded 
in part, it may still be read with profit). 

W. Heubi: Francois I et le mouvement intellectuel en 
France. 1914. 

A. Autin: L' Echec de la Reforme en France au XVI ^ Ste- 
ele, Contribution a T Histoire du Sentiment Eeligieux. 
1918. 

L. Bomier: Les Origines Politiques des Ouerres de Religion. 
2 vols. 1911-13. 

L. Bomier: "Les Protestants francais a la veille des guerres 
civiles," Revue Historique, vol.\24, 1917, pp. Iff, 225 ff. 

E. Armstrong: The French Wars of Religion. 1892. 

C. G. Kelley: French Protestantism 1559-62. Johns Hop- 
kins University Studies, vol. xxxvi, no. 4. 1919. 

N. Weiss: La Chambre Ardente. 1889. 

CHAPTER V. THE NETHERLANDS 

H. Pirenne: Bibliographie de I'Histoire de Belgique. Cata- 
logue des sources et des ouvrages principaux relatifs a 
I'histoire de tons les Pays-Bas juaq'en 1598.^ 1902. 

Sources : 

Kervyn de Lettenhove: Relations politiques des Pays-Bas et 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 767 

d'Angleterre. 10 vols. 1882-91. (Covers 1556-76). 

Resolutien der Staaten-Generaal 1576-1609. Door N. Ja- 
pikse. As yet 4 vols. (1576-84.) 1915-19. 

Corpus document orum Inquisitionis . . . Neerlandicae . . . 
Uitgegeven door P. Freclericq. Vols. 4-6, 1900 ft'. 

Bihliotheca Beformatoria Neerlandica . . . Uitgegeven door 
S. Cramer en F. Pijper. 1903-14. 10 vols. 

Collectanea van Gerardus Geldenhauer Noviomagus . . . Uit- 
gegeven . . . door J. Prinsen. 1901. 

La Chasse aux Lutheriens des Pays-Bas. Souvenirs de Fran- 
cisco de Enzinas. Paris. 1910. (Memoirs of a Spanish 
Protestant in the Netherlands. This edition is beauti- 
fully illustrated). 

Correspondance de Guillaume le Taciturne, publiee . . . par 
M. Gachard. 1847-57. 6 vols. 

Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas, 
publiee . . . par M. Gachard. 5 vols. 1848-79. 

H. Grotius: The Annals and History of the Loiv Country- 
Wars, Rendered into English by T. M[anley]. 1665. 

Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, of Elizabeth, ed. J. Steven- 
son and others. London 1863-1916. (19 volumes to 
date; much material on the Netherlands). 



LiTERATUEE. 

H. Pirenne: Eistoire de Belgique. Vols 3 and 4. 1907-11. 

(Standard work, A German translation by F. Arnheim 

was published of the third volume in 1907, before the 

French edition, and of the 4th volume, revised and 

slightly improved, in 1915). 
P. J. Blok: History of the People of the Netherlands. 

Translated by Ruth Putnam. Part 2, 1907, Part 3, 1900. 

(Also a standard work). 
E. Grossart: Charles V et Philippe II. 1910. 
Felix Rachfahl: Wilhelm von Oranien und der 7iiederldnd- 

ische Aufstand. Vols. 1 and 2. 1906-8. 
Ruth Putnam: William the Silent (Heroes of the Nations). 

1911. 
P. Kalkoff: Anfdnge der Gegenreformation in den Nieder- 

landen. 1903. (Monograph of value). 
Geschiedenis van de Hervorming en de Hervormde Kerk der 

Nederlanden, door J. Reitsma. Derde, bijgewerkte en 



768 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

vermeerderde Druk beworkt door L. A. von Langeraad 

... en bezorgd door F, Reitsma. 1916. 
J. L. Motley: The Rise of the Dutch Republic. 1855. (A 

classic, naturally in part superseded by later research). 
J. F. Motley: The Life and Death of John of Oldenbarneveld. 

1873. 
J. C. Squire: William the Silent. (1918). 



CHAPTER VI. ENGLAND 1509-88 

Bibliographies in Cambridge Modern History, and in the Po- 
litical History of England, by Pollard and Fisher, for 
which see below. 

Sources : 

Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of 
Henry VIII, arranged by J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and 
R. H. Brodie. 20 vols. (Monumental). 

Similar series of "Calendars of State Papers" have been pub- 
lished for English papers preserved at Rome (1 vol. 
1916), Spain, (15 vols.), Venice (22 vols), Ireland (10 
vols.), Domestic of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and 
James (12 vols.). Foreign Edward VI (1 vol.), Mary (1 
vol.), Elizabeth (19 vols, to 1585), Milan (1 vol. 1912). 
J The English Garner: Tudor Tracts 1532-88, ed. E. Arber. 
8 vols. 1877-96. 

Documents illustrative of English Church History, compiled 
by H. Gee and W. J. Hardy. 1896. 

Select Statutes and other Const^itutional Documents 1558- 
1625, ed. G. W. Prothero.- 1898. 

The Statutes of the Realm., printed by command of George 
III. 1819 ff. 

Select Cases before the King's Council in Star Chamber, ed. 
I. S. Leadam. Vol. 2, 1509-44. Selden Society. 1911. 

Original Letters, ed. by Sir H. Ellis. 1st series, 3 vols. 1824 ; 
2d series 4 vols. 1827 ; 3 series 4 vols. 1846. 

Literature : 

H. A. I. Fisher: Political History of England 1485-1547. 
New edition 1913. (Political History of England edited 
by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole, vol. 5. Standard work). 

A. F. Pollard: Political History of England 1547-1603. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 769 

1910. (Political History of England ed. by Hunt and 
Poole, vol. 6. Standard work). 

L. D. Innes: England under the Tudors. 1905. 

I. Gee: The Reformation Period. 1909. (Handbooks of 
English Church History). 

'. Gairdner : Lollardy and the Reform.ation. 4 vols. 1908 ff. 
(Written by an immensely learned man with a very 
strong high-church Anglican bias). 

'reserved Smith: "Luther and Henry VIII," English His- 
torical Review, xxv, 656 If, 1910. 

•reserved Smith: "German Opinion of the Divorce of Henry 
VIII," English Historical Review, xxvii, 671 11', 1912. 

•reserved Smith: "Hans Luft of Marburg," Nation, May 16, 
1912. 

'reserved Smith: "News for Bibliophiles," Nation, May 29, 
19i:{. (On early English translations of Luther). 

^reserved Smith: "Martin Luther and England," Nation, 
Dec. 17, 1914. 

•reserved Smith: "Complete List of Works of Luther in 
English," LutJieran Quartcrlij, October, 1918. 

\. R. Adair: "The Statute of Proclamations," English His- 
torical Review, xxxii, 34 flP. 1917. 

iOrd Ernest Hamilton: Elizahethan Ulster. (1919). 

*eter Guilday: The English Catholic Refugees on the Conti- 
nent 1558-1795. Vol. 1. 1914. (Brilliant study). 

L F. Pollard: England under Protector Somerset. 1900. 

L F. Pollard: Henry VIII. 1902. 

L F. Pollard: Thomas Cranmer. 1906. 

r. H. Pollen: The English Catholics in tJie Reign of Eliza- 
beth. 1920. 

^ A. Gasqiiet: The Eve of the Reformation. New ed. 1900. 

I. B. Merriman : The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromivell. J 
2 vols. 1902. (Valuable). 

L. 0. Meyer : England und die kathoUsche Kirche unter Eliz- 
abeth. 1911. (Thorough and brilliant). Said to be 
translated into English, 1916. 

Li. Tresal: Les origines du schisme anglican 1509-71. 1908. 

L J. Klein : Intolerance in the Reign of Elizabeth. 1917. 

r. A. Froude: History of England from the Fall of Wolsey J 
to the Armada. 12 vols. 1854-70. (Still the best 
picture of the time. Strongly royalist and Protestant, 
some errors in detail, brilliantly written). 



770 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Leslie Stephens and 

Sidney Lee. 63 vols. 1887-1900. 
Carlos B. Lumsden: The Dawn of Modern England 1509-25. 

1910. 
Richard Bagwell: Ireland under the Tudors. 3 vols. 1885. 
H. Holloway: The Reformation in Ireland. 1919. 
Mrs. J. R. Green: The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 

1200-1600. First edition 1908; revised and corrected 

1909, (Nationalist; interesting), 
H. N. Birt: The Elizabethan Religious Settlement. 1907. 
W. Walch: England's Fight with the Papacy. 1912. 
R. G. Usher: The Rise and Fall of High Commission. 1913. 
Die Wittenberger Artikel von 1536, hg. von G. Mentz. 1905. 
R. G. Usher: The Presbyterian Movement 1582-9. 1905. 



CHAPTER VII. SCOTLAND 

Sources. 
Acts of the Parliament of Scotland. 12 vols. 1844 ff. 
B. J. Kidd : Documents of the Continental Reformation, 1911, 

pp. 686-715. 
Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland 1509-1603. 2 

vols. ed. M. J. Thorpe. 1858. 
State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots 

1542-81, ed. J. Bain and W. K. Boyd. 5 vols, 1898 ff. 
Hamilton Papers, 1532-90, ed. J. Bain. 
Much in the English calendars for which see bibliography to 

chap, VI. 
John Knox's Works, ed. Laing, 1846-64. 
R. Lindsay of Pitseottie: Historic and cronicles of Scotland, 

ed. A. J, G. Mackay. 1899-1911. 3 vols. 
Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. J. Crans- 

toun, 2 vols, 1891. 
John Knox: The History of the Reformation of Religion in 

Scotland, ed. by Cuthbert Lennox. 1905. 
Literature : 
P. Hume Brown: History of Scotland. 3 vols. 1899-1909. 
W. L. Mathieson: Politics and Religion; a study of Scottish 

history from Reformation to Revolution. 2 vols. 1902. 
D. H. Fleming: The Reformation in Scotland. 1910. 

(Strongly Protestant). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 771 

G. Christie: The Influence of Letters on the Scottish Befor- 

mat ion. 1908. 
A. Lang: John Knox and the Reformation. 1905. 
J. Crook: John Knox the Reformer. 1907. 
A. B. Hart, "John Knox," in American Historical Review, 

xiii, 259-80. (Brilliant character study). 
R. S. Rait: "John Knox,"" in Quarterly Review, vol. 205, 

1906. 
A. Lang: The Mystery of Mary Stuart. 1902. 
Lady Blennerhassett : Maria Stuart, Konigin von Schottland. 

1907. 
A. Lang: A History of Scotland. 4 vols. 1900-7. 
P. Hume Brown: John Knox. 2 vols. 1895. 
H. Cowan: John Knox. 1905. 
A. R. Macewen : A History of the Church in Scotland. Vol. 

I (397-1546), 1913; Vol. II (1546-60), 1918. (Good). 
A. Lang: "Casket Letters," Encyclopcedia Britannica, 1910. 
P. Hume Brown: Surveys of Scottish History. 1919. 

(Philosophical). 

CHAPTER VIIT. THE COUNTER REFORMATION 

§§ 1 and 2. The Papacy and Italy 1521-1590. 
Sources : 
C. Mirbt: op. cit. 

Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum praelatorum de 

emendanda ecclesia 1537. In Mansi: Sacrorum Concil- 

, iorum et Decretorum collectio nova, 1751, Supplement 5, 

pp. 539-47. The same in German with Luther's notes 

in Luther's Werke, Weimar, vol. 50. 

Literature : 

L. von Pastor : A History of the Popes from the Close of the 
Middle Ages. English translation ed. by R. F. Kerr. 
Vols. 9-12. 1910 ff. (These volumes cover the period 
1522-1549. Standard work dense with new knowledge). 

L. von Pastor: Geschichte der Pdpste seit dem Ausgang des 
Mittelalters. Band VI. 1913; VII. 1920. (Of these vol- 
umes of the German, covering the years 1550-65, there is 
as yet no English translation). 

P. Herre : Papsttum und Papstwahl im Zeitalter PhUipps, II. 
1907. 



772 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

J. McCabe: Crises in the History of the Papacy. 1916. 
(Popular). 

Mandel Creighton: op. cit. 

L. von Ranker History of the popes, their church and state, 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, translated 
from the German by Sarah Austin. Vol. 1, 1841. 
(Translation of Ranke's Die rdmischen Papste, of 
which the first edition appeared 1834-6. A classic). 

H. M. Vaughan: The Medici Popes. 1908. (Popular, sym- 
pathetic). 

G. Droysen: Geschichte der Gegenreformation. 1893. 
(Oncken's Series). 

E. Rodocanachi: "La Reformation en Italic," Revue des 
Deux Mondes, March, 1915. 

Lord Acton: Lectures on Modern History, 1906, pp. 108 ff. 

J. A. Symonds: The Catholic Reaction. 2 vols. 1887. 

G. Monod: "La Reforme Catholique," Revue Historique, 
vol. exxi (1916). 

B. Wiffen: Life and Writings of Juan de V aides. 1865. 

C. Hare: Men and Women of the Italian Reformation. 

(1913). 
Kirche und Reformation. Unter mitwirkung von L. v. 

Pastor, W. Schnyder, L. Schneller usw. hg. von 

J. Scheuber. 1917. 
"Counter-Reformation" in the Catholic Encyclopcedia. 
G. Benrath: Geschichte der Reformation in Venedig. 1886. 
J. Burckhardt: op. cit. 

§ 3, The Council of Trent 

Sources : 

Concilium. Tridentinum. Diariorum, actorum, epistularum, 
tractatuum nova collectio. Edidit Societas Goerres- 
iana. 1901 ff. In course of publication ; as yet have ap- 
peared vols. 1-5, 8, 10. 

J. Susta: Die romische Kurie und das Konzil von Trient 
unter Pius IV. Aktenstiicke zur Geschichte des Konzils 
von Trient. 4 vols. 1904-1914. 

Le Plat: Monumenta ad historiam Concilii Tridentini spec- 
tantia. 7 vols. 1781-7. 

The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Coun- 
cil of Trent, translated by J. Waterworth. 1848. Re- 
print, Chicago, 1917. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 773 

G. Drei: "Per la Storia del Concilio de Trento. Lettere in- 

edite del Segretario Camille Olivo 1562." Archivio 8to- 

rico Italiano 1916. 
P. Schaff: The Creeds of Christendom. Vol. 2, 1877. 

(Latin text and English translation of canons and 

decrees). 
The Cathechism of the Council of Trent, translated into 

English by J. Donovan. 1829. 

Literature : 
J. A. Froude: Lectures on the Council of Trent. 1899. 
P. Sarpi: The historic ,of the Councel of Trent. 1620. 
(Translation from the Italian, which first appeared 1619). 
A. Harnack: Lehrhuch der Dogmengeschichte,* 1910, vol. iii, 
pp. 692 ff. English translation, vol. vii, pp. 35-117. 
Ranke's remark that there was no good history of the 
Council of Trent holds good today. The best, as far as it 
goes, is in Pastor. 

§ 4. The Jesuits 

V, Sources : 
Bihliotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus. I ere partie: Biblio- 
graphic par les peres De Backer. 2eme partie par A. 

Carayan. Nouvelle ed. par C. Sommervogel. 10 vols. 

1890-1909. Corrections et Additions par E. M. Riviere. 

1911. 
Monumenta historica Societatis Jesu, edita a Patribus ejusdem 

Societatis. Madrid, 1894-1913. 46 volumes. 
Cartas de San Ignacio de Loyola, 6 vols. 1874-89. 
Acta Sanctorum, July 7. 1731. 
The Autohiogra'phy of St. Ignatius, English translation ed. 

by J. F. X. O'Connor. 1900. 
Letters and Instructions of St. Ignatius Loyola, translated by 

D. F. OLeary and ed. by A. Goodier. 1914. 
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Spanish and 

English, by J. Rickaby, S. J. 1915. 
Beati Petri Canisii, S. J., Epistulae et Acta, ed. O. Brauns- 

berger. 6 vols, as yet. 1896-1913. 

Literature. 
H. Boehmer: Les Jesuites. Ouvrage traduit de I'allemand 
avec une Introduction et des Notes par G. Monod. 1910. 
(Standard work though very concise). 



/774 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

E. Gothein: Ignatius von Loyolu und die Gegenreformation. 
1895. 

A. McCabe: A Candid History of the Jesuits. 1913. (Hos- 

tile but not Tinveraeious) . 

B. Buhr: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ldndern deutscher 

Zunge im 16ten Jahrhimdert. Band I. 1907. 

H. Fouqueray : Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus en France. 
2 vols. 1910-13. 

E. L. Taunton: The Jesuits in England. 1901. 

Francis Thompson: Saint Ignatius Loyola. 1913. (I men- 
tion this book by "a seventeenth century poet born into 
the nineteenth century" on account of the author's fame). 

S. Brou: St. Frangois Xavier. 2 vols. Paris, 1912. 

J. M. Cros: St. Frangois de Xavier, 2 vols. Toulouse, 1900. 

On Xavier see also Mirbt, op cit., no. 350, A. D. White : War- 
fare of Science and Theology, 1896, ii, 5-22, and Pastor. 

Life of St. Francis Xavier hy Edith A. Stewart, with transla- 
tions from his letters by D. Macdonald. 1917. (Pop- 
ular and sympathetic). 

W. G. Jayne: Vasco da Gama and his successors (1910), On 
Xavier, pp. 188 ff. 

§ 5. The Inquisition and the Index 

Sources : 

P. Fredericq: Corpus Documentorum Inquisitioms Neerlan- 
dicce, vols. 4, 5., 1900 ff. 

L. von Pastor: Allegemeine Dekrete der romischen Inquisi- 
tion 1555-97. 1913. 

Mandament der Keyserlijcken Maiesteit, vuytghegeven int 
laer xlvi. Louvain. 1546. One hundred facsimile copies 
printed for A. M. Huntington at the De Vinne Press, 
New York, 1896. 

Catalogi Librorum reprohatorum & prcelegendorum ex iudicio 
Academice Louaniensis, Pinciae. MDLI. Mandato do- 
minorum de consilio sanctae generalis Inquisitionis. One 
hundred facsimile copies printed for A. M. Huntington 
at the De Vinne Press, New York, 1895. 

Catalogus lihrorum qui prohibentur mandato Illustrissimi & 
Rev. D. D. Ferdinand de Valdes, Hispalen. Archiepis- 
copi, Inquisitoris Generalis Hispaniae, 1559. One hun- 
dred facsimile copies printed at De Vinne Press, 1895. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 775 

LiTERATUBE. 

H. C. Lea: A Historif of the Inquisition in Spain. 4 vols. 
1906-7. Characterized by wide reading and the use 
of many manuscripts which Lea had copied from all 
European archives. A really wonderful work. The 
manuscripts on which it is based are still in his library 
in Philadelphia. I have been kindly allowed by his son 
and daughter to look over those on Spanish Protes- 
tantism. 

H. C. Lea: The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. 
1908. 

P. Fredericq: ''Les recents historiens catholiques de I'lnqui- 
sition en France," Revue Historique, cix, 1912), pp. 
307 ff. (A scathing criticism of the apologists of the In- 
quisition who have written against Lea). 

E. N. Adler: Auto de Fe and the Jew. 1908. 

E. Schafer: Beitrdge zur Geschichte des spanischen Protes- 

tantismus und der Inquisition. 3 vols. 1902. 
G. Bushbell: Reformation und Inquisition in Italien um die 
Mitte des XVI Jahrhunderts. 1910. 

F. H. Reusch: Dcr Index der verhotenen Bitcher. 2 vols. 

1883. (Standard). 
J. Hilgers: Der Index der verhotenen Biicher. 1904. 

(Apologetic). 
H. C. Lea: Chapters from the Religious History of Spain 

connected with the Inquisition. 1890. (Chiefly on the 

Index). 
Articles: "Inquisition," "Holy Offtce," &c. in the Encylo- 

pmdia of Religion and Ethics, Protestantische Realency- 

clopddie, Catholic Encyclopedia, &c. 

G. H. Putnam: The Censorship of the Church of Rome. 2 

vols. 1906. 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE EXPANSION 
OF EUROPE 

§ 1. Spain 

Sources : 
Coleccion 'de documentos ineditos para la historia de Espana. 

112 vols. 1842 ff. 
Nueva Coleccion de documentos ineditos dx. 6 vols. 1892-6. 



776 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, Spanish, 

&c., 15 vols, covering 1509-1603, except 1555-8. 1862 

to date. 
A. Morel-Fatio: Historiographie de Charles Quint. 1913. 

(Contains a new French version of the Commentaries 

of Charles V). 
F. L. de Gomara: Annals of the Emperor Charles V, ed. by 

R. B. Merriman. 1912. 

Literature. 

Rafael Altamira y Crevea: Historia de Espana, Tomo III,^ 
1913. (The best general history, very largely social, 
written in easy, popular style). 

C. E. Chapman: The History of Spain. 1918. (Based on 
Altamira). 

R. B. Merriman: The Rise of the Spanish Empire. 2 vols., 
to 1516. 1918. (Doubtless the future volumes of the 
excellent work will be even more valuable for our present 
purpose) . 

K. Habler: Geschichte Spaniens unter den Hadshurgern, 
Band 1, 1907. (Standard work for the period of 
Charles V). 

Martin A. S. Hume: Spain, its Greatness and Decay 1479- 
1788. 1898. (Popular). 

M. A. S. Hume: Philip II of Spain. 1897. 

E. Gossart: Charles V et Philip II. 1910. 

E. A. Armstrong: Charles V. Second ed. 1910. 2 vols. 

W. H. Prescott: History of the Reign of Philip II, King of 
Spain. 1855-74. (Unfinished, a classic). 

H. C. Lea: The Moriscos in Spain: their Conversion and Ex- 
pulsion. 1901. 

Bratli: Philippe II, roi d'Espagne, 1912. (An unhappy 
attempt to whitewash Philip; uses some new material). 

M. Philippson : Westeiiropa im Zeitalter von Philip II, Eliz- 
abeth und Heinrich IV. 1882. 

§ 2. The Expansion of Europe 

W. H. Prescott: History of the Conquest of Mexico. 1843. 
(A classic). 

W. H. Prescott : History of the Conquest of Peru. 1847. 

H. Vander Linden: "Alexander VI and the Bulls of De- 
marcation," American Historical Review, xxii, 1916, pp. 
1 ff.. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 777 

I. A. Wright: Early History of Cuba, 1492-1586. 1916. 
C. de lannoy et H. Van der Linden: L' Expansion coloniale 

des Peuples Europeens. Vol. 1. Portugal et Espagne. 

1907. 

E. G. Bourne: Spain in America. 1904. (Excellent). 

S. Ruge: Geschichte des Zeitalters de-r Entdeckungen. 1881. 
(Onckeii: Allgemeine Geschichte). 

P. Leroy-Beaulieu : De la Colonisation chez les peuples mod- 
ernes. 1st ed. 1874. 6th ed. 1908. 2 vols. 

J. Winsor: Narrative and Critical History of America, vols. 
1, 2, 1889, 1886. 

H. Morse Stephens: The Story of Portugal. 1891. 

G. Young: Portugal Old and Young. 1917. 

The Commentaries of the great Afon&o Dalboquerque, ed. by 
W. de G. Birch. 4 vols. 1875-84. 

K. G. Jayne: Vasco da Gama and his Successors. (1910). 

K. Waliszewski: Ivan le Terrible. 1904. 

The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries 
of the English Nation, by R. Hakluyt. 12 vols. 1903. 

Purchas His Pilgrimes, by S. Purchas. 20 vols. 1905. 

F. G. Davenport: European Treaties bearing on the History 

of the United States and its Dependencies. 1917. 
W. C. Abbott: The Expansion of Europe. 2 vols. 1918. 



CHAPTER X 

SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

As the sources for this chapter would include all the ex- 
tant literature and documents of the period, it is impossible 
to do more than mention a few of those particularly referred 
to. Moreover, as most political histories now have chapters 
on social and economic conditions, a great deal on the sub- 
ject will be found in the previous bibliographies. 

General 
Sources : 

Wm. Harrison's Description of England (1577, revised and 
enlarged 1586) ed. F. J. Furnivall. 1877 ff. 7 parts. 

Social Tracts, ed. A. Lang from Arber's English Garner. 
1904. 



778 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Literature. 

Handworterhuch der Staatswissenschaften,^ ed. J. Conrad, 
W. A. Lexis, E. Loening. 8 vols. 1909-11. (Stan- 
dard). 

Worterbuch der Volkswirtschaft,^ hg. von L. Elster. 2 vols. 
1911. 

Social England, ed. by H, D. Traill and J. S. Mann. Vol. 
3. Henry VIII to Elizabeth. 1902. (Standard work, 
originally published 1894). 

S. B. Fay: The Hohenzollern Household. 1916. 

A Catalogue of French Economic Documents from the 16th, 
17th and 18th Centuries, published by the John Crerar 
Library, Chicago, 1918. 

H. van Houtte: Documents pour servir a V histoire des prix 
de 1387 a 1794. 1902. 

Cavaignac: *'La Population de I'Espagne vers 1500." 
Seances et Travaiix de V Academic des Sciences morales et 
politiques, 79e Annee, 1919, pp. 491 ff. (puts the popu- 
lation at ten to twelve millions). 

J. Culevier: Les denomhrements de foyers en Brabant (XVIe 
et XVIIe siecles.) 1912. 

W. Cunningham: Essay on Western Civilization in its Eco- 
nomic Aspect. Vol. 2. 1900. 

J. Beloch: "Die Bevolkerung Europas zur Zeit der Renais- 
sance." Zeitschrift filr Sozialwissenschaft, iii, 1900, pp. 
765-86. 

D. J. Hill: A History of Diplomacy in the International De- 
velopment of Europe. Vol. 2. 1910. 

C. H. Haring: "American^ Gold and Silver Production in 
the first half of the Sixteenth Century," Quarterly Jour- 
nal of Economics, May, 1915. 

C. H. Haring: Trade and Navigation between Spain and the 
Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs. 1918. 

L. Felix: Der Einfluss von Staat und Becht auf die Ent- 
wicklung des Eigenthums. 2te Halfte, 2te Abteilung. 
1903. 

G. Wiebe: Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution der 16. und 17. 
Jahrhunderten, in Von Miaskowski : Staats und sozi- 
alwissenschaftliche Beitrage, II, 2. 1895. (Important.) 

G. d' Avenel: Histoire economique de la propriete, des sal- 
cdres, des denrees et de tons les prix en general 1200-^ 
1800. 6 vols. 1894 ff. (Wonderfully interesting work). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 779 

G. d'Avenel: Decouvertes d'Hisioire Sociale. 1910, (Brief 

sumniaiy of his larger work). 
W. Naude: Die Getreidehandelspolitik der Europdischen 

Sinaten von 13ten his zum 18ten Jahrhiindert. 1896. 
N. S. B. Gras: The Evolution of the English Corn Market. 

1915. 

A. P. Usher: The History of the Grain Trade in France. 

1100-1710. 1913. 
K. Habler: Die wirtschaftliche Blilte Spaniens im 16. Jahr- 
hiindert und ihr V erf all. 1888. 

B. Moses: ''The Economic Condition of Spain in the 16th 

Century." American Historical Association Reports. 

1893. 
E. P. Cheyney: Social Changes in England in the Sixteenth 

Century as Reflected in Contemporary Literature. Part 

J, Rural Changes. 1895. 
A. Luschin von Ebengreuth: Allgemeine Milnzkunde imd 

Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit. 

1904. 

§ 4. Life of the People 

Sources : 

Das Zimmersche Chronik,^ hg. v. K. A. Barack. 4 vols. 
1861-2. 

Social Germany in Luther's Time, the Memoirs of Bartholo- 
mew Sastrow, translated by A. D. Vandam. 1902. 

T. Tusser: A Hundred Points of Good Huslandrie. 1558. 
(Later expanded as: Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- 
bandry united to as many of Good Huswifery. 1573). 

I. von Pastor: Die Reise Kardinals Luigi d'Aragona 1517-8. 
1905. (Erganzungen und Erliiuterungen zu Janssens 
Geschichte des deutschen Volkes. Band IV, Teil 4). 

Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier. English 
translation by Opdycke. 1903. 

Th^ Seconde Parte of a Register: being a Calendar of Man- 
Xiscripts binder th-at title intended for publication by the 
Puritans. 1593. By A. Peel. 2 vols. 1915. 

Treatises : 

E. B. Bax: German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages. 

1894. 
P. V. B. Jones: Household of a Tudor Nobleman. 1917. 



780 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

W. B. Rye: England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of 

Elizabeth and James I. 1865. 
C. L. Powell: English Domestic Relations, 1487-1653: a 

study of Matrimony and Family Life in Theory and 

Practice as revealed in the Literature, Law and History 

of the Period. 1917. 
W. Kawerau: Die Reformation und die Ehe. 1892. 
P. S. Allen: The Age of Erasmus. 1914. 
K. R. Greenfield: Sumptuary Laws of Nilrnb&rg. 1918. 
Preserved Smith: "Some old Blue Laws," Open Court, 

April, 1915. 
H. Almann : Das Lehen des deutschen Volkes bem Beginn der 

Neuzeit. 1893, 

E. S. Bates: Touring in 1600. 1911. 

T. F. Ordish: The Early London Theatres. 1894. 

J. Cartwright: Baldassare Castiglione. 2 vols. 1908. 

J. L. Pagel: Geschichte der Medizin. Zweite Auflage von 

K. midhoff. 1915. 
A. H. Buck : The Growth of Medicine from the Earliest Times 

to about 1800. 1917. 
H, Haeser: Geschichte der Medicin. Band 11.^ 1881. 

F. H. Garrison: An Introduction to the History of Medicine. 

1914. 
J. Lohr: Methodisch-hritische Beitrage zur Geschichte der 

Sittlichlieit des Klerus, besonders der Erzdiozese Koln 

am Ausgang des Mittelalters. 1910. 
H. A. Krose : Der Einfluss der Konfession auf die Sittlichkeit 

nach den Ergebnissen der Statistik. 1900, 
Henri (J. A.) Baudrillart: Histoire du luxe prive et public 

dcpuis I'antiquite jusqu' a nos jours. Vol. 3, Moyen Age 

et Renaissance. 1879. 

CHAPTER XI 

THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION 

Many of the books referred to in the last chapter and 
many general histories have chapters on the subject. Their 
titles are not repeated here, 

English Economic History. Select Documents ed. by A. E. 
Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney. 1914. (With 
helpful bibliographies and well-selected material). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 781 

H. G. Rosedale: Queen Elizabeth and the Levant Company. 
1904. 

E. Levasseur: Histoire des classes ouvrieres et de I' industrie 
en France avant 1789.^ 2 vols. 1900-1. 

G. Avenel: Faysans et Ouvriers depuis sept cent ans.* 1904. 

W. Cunningham : The Growth of English Industry and Com- 
merce, during the Early and Middle Ages.^ 1910. Mod- 
em Times.^ 1894. 

W. J. Ashley: The Economic Organisation of England. 
1914. (Brief, brilliant). 

G. TTnwin: The Industrial Organization of England in the 
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 1904. (Scliol- 
,ariy). 

A. P. Usher: The Industrial History of England. 1920. 

J. W. Burgon: Life and Times of Sir T. Gresham. 2 vols. 
1839. 

0. Noel: Histoire du commerce du monde. 3 vols. 1891- 
1906. 

H. G. Selfridge: The Romance of Commerce. 1918. 

J. A. Williamson: Maritime Enterprise 1485-1558. 1913. 

J. Strieder: Die Inventar der Firnia Fugger aus dem Jahre 
1527. 1905. 

J, Strieder: Zur Genesis des modernen Kapitalismus. 1904. 

J. Strieder: Studien zur Oeschichte kapitalistischer Organi- 
sations for men: Monopole, KarteUe und Aktiengesellschaf- 
ten im Mittelalter und zu Beginn der Neuzeit. 1914. 
(Highly important). 

Clive Day: History of Commerce. 1907. 

W. Miick: Der Mansf elder Kupferschieferherghau. 1910. 

R. Ehrenberg: Das Zeitalter der Fugger. Band I, 1896. 

C. A. Herrick: History of Commerce and Industry. 1917. 
(Text-book). 

M. P. Rooseboom: The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands, 
1292-1676. 1910. 

W. Sombart: Krieg und Kapitalismus. 1913. 

W. Sombart: Der Moderne Kapitalismus? 2 vols, in 3. 
1916-7. 

L. Brentano: Die Anfdnge des modernen Kapitalismus. 
1916. 

A. Schulte : Die Fugger in Rom. 2 vols. 1904. 

Maxime Kowalewsky: Die okonomische Entwicklung Eu- 
ropas his zum Beginn der kapitalistischen Wirtschafts- 



782 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

form. Aus dem Russischen iibersetzt von A. Stein. Vol. 

6. 1913. (Important). 
R. E. Prothero: English Farming Past and Present. 1912. 
E. F. Gay: "Inclosures in England in the 16th Century," 

Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 17, 1903. 
E. F. Gray: Zur Geschichte der Einhegungen in England. 

1902. (Berlin dissertation). 
J. S. Leadam: The* Domesday of Inclosures. 1897. 
J. E. T. Rogers : Six Centuries of Work and Wages. 1884. 
J. E. T. Rogers: A History of Agriculture and Prices in 

England. Vols, iii and iv, 1400-1582. 1882. (A 

classic). 
J. Klein : The Mesta : A Study in Spanish Economic History. 

1920. 
R. H. Tawney: The Agrarian Pnohlem in the Sixteenth Cen- 
tury. 1912. 
W. Stolze: Zur Vorgeschichte des Bauernkrieges. (Staats- 

und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, hg. von G. 

Schmoller. Band 18, Heft 4). 1900. 
J. Hayem: Les Greves dans les Temps Modemes. Memoires 

et Documents pour servir a Vhistoire dii commerce et de 

rindustrie en France. 1911. 
I. Feuchtwanger : "Geschichte der sozialen Politik und des 

Armenwesens im Zeitalter der Reformation." Jahrhuch 

filr Gesetzgehung, 1908, xxxii, and 1909, xxxiii. 
J. S. Schapiro: Social Reform and the Reformation. 

1909. 
G. TThlhorn: Die ChristlicJie Liehestdtigkeit. 1895. 
E. M. Leonard: The Early History of English Poor Relief. 

1900. 
0. Winckelmann : ''Die Armenordnungen von Niirnberg 

(1522), Kitzingen (1523), Regensburg (1523) und 

Ypern (1525)," Archiv filr Reformationsgeschichte, x, 

1913 and xi, 1914. 
J. L. Vivos: Concerning the Relief of the Poor, tr. by M. M. 

Sherwood. 1917. 
Liher Vagatorum, reprinted, with Luther's preface, in 

Luther's Werke, Weimar, vol. xxvi, pp. 634 ff. 
Brooks Adams: The New Empire. 1902. (Fanciful). 
K. Lampreoht: Zum Verstdndnis der wirtschaftUchen und 

sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14-16. Jahr- 

hundert. 1893. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 783 

Shakespeare's England, by various authors. 2 vols. 1916. 
chap, xi, G. Unwin: "Commerce and Coinage." 

H. Schonebaum: ''Antwerpens Bliitezeit im XVI. Jahrhun- 
dcrt." Archiv fur KulturgescMchte, xiii. 1917. 

0. Winckelmaiin : "Ueber die altesten Armenordnungen der 
Keformationszeit." Eistorische Vierteljahrschrift, xvii. 
1914-5. 

Stella Kramer: The English Craft Gilds and the Govern- 
ment. 1905. 

Niederldndische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte der 
Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte . . . iearheitet 
von R. Hapke. Band I (1531-57). 1913. 

W. Cunningham: Progress of Capitalism in England. 
1916. 

CHAPTER XII 
MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 
§ 1. Bihlical and Classical Scholarship 

Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ah Erasmo Rot. recog- 
nitum et emendatum. Basileae. 1516. (Nearly 300 
editions catalogued in the Bibliotheca Erasmiana. In 
Erasmi Opera Omnia, 1703, vol. VI.) 

Novum testamentum graece et latine in academia Complutensi 
n^viter impressum. 1514. Vetu^ testamentum multi- 
plici lingua nunc primum impressum. hi hac prae- 
clarissima Complutensi universitate. 1517. 

C. R. Gregory: Die Textkritik des Neuen Testaments. 3 
parts. 1900-9. 

Articles "Bible," in Encyclopcedia Britannica, Encyclopcedia 
of Religion and Ethics, Protestantische Realencyklopddie, 
and Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 

E. von Dobschiitz : The Influence of the Bible on Civilization. 

1913. 

F. Falk : Die Bihel am Ausgange des Mittelalters, ihre Kennt- 

nis und ihre Verhreitung. 1905. 

Martin Luther's Deutsche Bihel, in Sammtliche Werke, Wei- 
mar, separately numbered, vols, i, ii, iii, v. 

K. 'FullertGn: "Luther's doctrine and criticism of Scrip- 
ture," Bibliotheca Sacra, Jan. and April, 1906. 

H. Zerener: Studien ilber das beginnende Eindringen der 
lutheri^chen Bibeliibersetzung in der deutschen Literatur. 
1911. 



784 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lutherstudicn zur 4. Jahrhundertfeier der Reformation, von 
den Mitarbeitern der W&imarer Lutherausgabe. 1917. 
pp. 203 ff. 

K. A. Meissinger: Luther's Exegese in der Friihzeit. 1911. 

0. Reichert: Martin Luther's Deutsche Bibel. 1910. 

Sir H. H. Howorth: "The Biblical Canon according to the 
Continental Reformers," Journal of Theological Studies, 
ix, 188 ff. (1907-8). 

J. P. Hentz: History of the Lutheran Version of the Bible. 
1910. 

D. Lortsch: Histoire de la Bible en France. 1910. 

A. W. Pollard : Records of the English Bible. 1911. 

S. C. Macauley: "The English Bible," Quarterly Review, 
Oct. 1911, pp. 505 ff. 

W. Canton: The Bible and the Anglo-Saxon People. 1914. 

H. T. Peck: A History of Classical Philology. 1911. 

Sir J. E. Sandys: "Scholarship," chap, ix in Shakespeare's 
England, 1916. 

Sir J. E. Sandys : A History of Classical Scholarship. Vol. ii, 
1908. (Standard). 

H. Hallam: Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 
15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. 1837-9. (Very compre- 
hensive, in part antiquated, somewhat external but on the 
whole excellent). 

§ 2. History 

Treatises : 
E. Pueter: Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie. 1911T 

French translation, revised, 1916. (Work of brilliance: 

philosophical, reliable, readable). 
M. Ritter: "Studien iiber die Entwicldung der Geschichts- 

wissenschaft. " Historische Zeitschrift, cit. (1912). 

261 ff. 
E. Menke-Gliickert : Die Geschichtschreibung der Reforma- 
tion und Gegenreformation. Bodin und die Begrilndung 

der Geschichtsmethodologie durch Bartholomdus Keeker-, 

mann. 1912. 
P. Joachimsen: Geschichtsauffassung und Geschichtschrei- 

bung in Deutschland unter dem Ei^ifluss des Humanis- 

mus. Teil I. 1910. 
G. L. Burr : ' ' The Freedom of History, ' ' American Historical 

Review, xxii, 261 f. 1916. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 785 

A. Morel-Fatio: Historiographie de Charles-Quint. 1913. 

F. C. Baur: Die Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschrei- 

hung. 1852. 
L. von Ranke: Zur Kritik neueren GescMchtschreiber.^ 
1874. 

G. Wolf: Quellenkunde der deutschen Be formations ge- 
schichte. Vol. i, 1915 ; vol. ii, 1916. 

Article, ''History" in Encyclopedia Americans, ed. of 1919. 

Originals. 

If. Machiavelli: Istorie fiorentine. (to 1492). First ed. 
1561-64. Numerous editions, and English translation by 
C. E. Detmold: The Historical, Political and Diplomatic 
Writings of N. Machiavelli. 4 vols. 1882. 

Francesco Guicciardini : Storia fiorentina. (1378-1509). 
First published 1859. Istoria d' Italia. (1492-1534). 
First edition 1561-64 ; numerous editions since, and Eng- 
lish translation by G. Fenton: The historic of Guicciar- 
dini. 1599. 

Benvenuto Cellini: Life, translated by R. H. H. Cust. 2 
vols. 1910. (The original text first correctly published 
b}^ 0. Bacci, 1901. Many English translations). 

Paulus Jovius: Ilistoriarum sui temporis lihri. xlv. (1493-- 
1547). 1550-52. 

Polydore Verg-il: Anglicne Historiae lihri. xxvii, (to 15.38). 
First edition, to 1509, Basle, 1534; 2d ed. 1555. (I use 
the edition of 1570. The best criticism is in H. A. L. 
Fisher's Political History of England 1485-1547, pp. 
152 ff.) 

Polydore Vergil: De rerum inventorihus lihri octo. 1536. 
2d ed., enlarged, 1557. 

Caesar Baronius: Annales Ecclesiastici (to 1198). Rome, 
1588-1607. 

Ecclesiastica Historia . . . secundum centurias, a M. Flacio, 
et aliis. Magdeburg. 1559-74. 

H. Bullinger: Reformationsgeschichte, hg. von J. J. Hottin- 
gcr und II. II. Vogeli. 3 vols. 1838-40. (Index to 
this in preparation by W. Wuhrmann; Bullinger 's Cor- 
respondence will also soon appear). 

Joan. Sleidani: De statu religionis et reipuhlicae, Carolo 
Quinto Caesare, commentariorum lihri xxvi. 1555. 
(My edition, 1785, 3 vols., was owned formerly by I. 
Dolliuger). 



786 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Joannis Cochlaei: Historia de Actis et scriptis M. Lutheri 
1517-46.. Coloniae. 1549. (Critique in A. Herte's dis- 
sertation, Die Lutherbiographie des J. Coehlaeus. 
1915). 

J. Mathesius : Siehzehn Predigten van den Historien des 
Herrn Doctoris Martini Luthers. 1st ed. 1566; new ed. 
by Losehe, 1898. 

Memoires de Martin et de Guillaume du Bellas/: (1513-52). 
1st ed. 1569. Critical ed. by V. L. Bourrilly and Fleury^ 
Vindry, 1908 ff. 

Blaise de Monluc: Commentaires (1521-76); 1st ed. 1592; 
critical ed. by P. Courtreault. 1911-14. 

Oeuvres de P. de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantome, ed. L. La- 
lanne. 11 vols. 1864 ff. 

J. J. Scaliger: Opus novum de emendatione temportfm. 
1583, 1593. 

Histoire ecclesiastique des eglises frangaises reformees. Pub, 
par Baum et Cunitz. 3 vols. 1883-9. (Attributed, 
with probability, to Beza; first published 1580). 

Jean Bodin: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 
1566. 

Peter Martyr d' Anghiera: Opus epistolarum. 1530. (This 
rare edition at Harvard. The work is a history in the 
form of letters, partly fictitious, partly genuine. Cf. J. 
Bernays: Peter Martyr Anghierensis und sein Opus 
Epistolarum. 1891). 

Ignatius de Loyola: Autobiography. Monumenta Societa- 
tis Jesu, ser. iv, torn. 1, 1904. English translation ed. 
by J. F. X. 'Connor. 1900. 

George Buchanan: Berum scoticarum historia. Edinburgh. 
1582. (Cf. M. Meyer-Cohn: G. Buchanan als Publizist 
und Historiker Maria Stuarts. 1913). 

John Knox: The History of the Reformation of Religion 
ivithin the realm of Scotland. (First incomplete edi- 
tion, 1586 ; critical complete edition by D. Laing, 1846, 
in vol. 1 of Knox's Works. Cf. A. Lang: "Knox as His- 
torian," Scottish Historical Review, ii, 1905, pp. 113 ff). 

John Foxe: Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs. 
1563. (The MS that I have compared with Fox is Har- 
leian MS 419 of the British Museum, endorsed: "John 
Fox's Collection of Letters and Papers on Theological 
Matters," fol. 125). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 787 

Nicholas Sanders: De origine et progressu schismatis Angli- 
cani. 1585, 

Edward Hall: The Union of the Nolle and Illustrious Fam- 
ilies of Lancaster and York, 1542. Published as Hall's 
Chronicle, 1809. 

Raphael Holinshed: Chronicles of England, Scotland and 
Ireland. Vol. 1, 1577. 

John Stow : The Chronicles of England from Brute unto this 
present year of Christ 1580. Second edition, The Annals 
of England, 1592. 

§ 3. Political Theory 

Sources : 
Erasmus: Institutia principis christiani, in Opera omnia, 

1703, iv, 561. 
The Utopia of 8ir Thomas More (English and Latin) edited 

by G. Sampson with an introduction by A. Guthkelch. 

1910. 
N. Machiavelli: The Prince. (Innumerable editions and 

translations). 
H. Jordan: Luthers Staatsauffassung. 1917. (Extracts 

from his works). 
Zwingli: De vera et falsa religione, Werke ed. Egli, Finsler 

und Kohler, iii, (1914), 590 ff. 
Calvin: Institutio, ed. 1541, cap. xvi. 
L. Vives: De communione rerum. 1535. 
Vindidae contra Tyrannos, sive de principis in populum 

populique in principem legitima pot estate. Stephano 

lunio Bruto Celta Auctore. 1580. 
Francisci Hotmani Francogallia. Nunc quartum ah auctore 

rccognita. 1586. 
E. de la Boetie: Discours de la servitude volontaire. In, 

Oeuvres completes pub. par P. Bonnefon. 1892, pp. 1 ff. 
De Jure Magistratuum in subditos [by Beza]. 1573. 
The Worlis of Mr. Richard Hooker, ed J. Keble. 3 vols. 

1888. 
J. Bodin: Les six livres de la repuhlique. 1577. 
G. Buchanan: De Jure Begni apud Scotos. 1579. 
J. de Mariana: De rege et regis institutione. 1599. 

Literature: 

Lord Acton: ''Freedom in Christianity," (1877), in The 

History of Freedom and other Essays, ed. J. N. Figgis and 

R. V. Lawrence. 1907. 



788 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

W. A. Dunning: A History of Political Theories. Ancient 
and Medieval. 1902. From Luther to Montesquieu. 
1905. 

J. N. Figgis: Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to 
Grotius.^ 1916. 

J. Mackinnon: A History of Modern Liberty. Vol. 2. The 
Age of the Eeformation. 1907. 

I. Cardauns: Die Lehre vom Widerstandsrecht des Volkes 
gegen die rechtmdssige Ohrigkeit im Luthertum und im 
Calvinismus des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts. 1903. 

R. Chauvire : Jean Bodin, Auteur de la Repuhlique. 1914. 

J. Kreutzer: Zwinglis Lehre von der Ohrigkeit. 1909. 

F. Meinecke: "Luther iiber christliehen Geminwesen und 

christliehen Staat," Historische Zeitschrift, Band 121, 

pp. 1 ff, 1920. 
J. Faulkner: "Luther and Economic Questions," Papers of 

the Am. Ch. Hist. Soc, 2d ser. vol. ii, 1910. 
K. D. Macmillan: Protestantism in Germany. 1917. 
K. Sell: "Der Zusammenhang von Reformation und polit- 

ischer Freiheit. " Ahh. in Theolog. Arheiten aus dem 

rhein. wiss. Predigerverein. Neue Folge. 12. 1910. 
L. H. Waring: The Political Theories of Martin Luther. 

1910. 

G. von Schulthess-Rechberg : Luther, Zwingli und Calvin in 

ihren Ansichten iiber das Verhdltnis von Staat und 
Kirche. 1910. 

K. Rieker: "Staat und Kirche nach lutherischer, reformier- 
ter, moderner Anschauung," Hist. Vierteijahrschrift, i, 
370 ff. 1898. 

E. Troeltsch: Die Soziallehren der christliehen Kirchen und 
Gruppen. 1912. 

H. L. Osgood: "The Political Ideas of the Puritans." Po- 
litical Science Quarterly, vi, 1891. 

R. Treumann: Die Monarchomachen. Fine Darstellung der 
revolutiondren Staatslehren des xvi Jahrhundert 1573- 
1599. 1885. 

A. Elkan: Die Puhlizistik der Bartholomdusnacht und Mor- 
nays Vindiciae contra tyrannos. 1905. 

H. D. Foster: "The Political Theories of the Calvinists," 
American Historical Review, xxi, 481 ff. (1916). 

Paul van Dyke: "The Estates of Pontoise," English His- 
torical Review, 1913, pp. 472 ff. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 789 

E. Armstrong: "Political Theory of the Huguenots," Eng- 
lish Historical Review, iv, 13 ff, 1889. 

K. Glaser: "Beitrage zur Geschiehte der politisehen Litera- 
tur Frankreiehs in der zweiten Halfte des 16. Jahr- 
hundert." Zeitschrift filr Franzosische Sprache und 
Uteratur. Vols. 31, 32, 33, 39, 45; 1904-18. 

W. Sohm: "Die Soziallehren Melanchthons, " Historische 
Zeitschrift, exv, pp. 64-76. 1915. 

Lord Acton: History of Freedom, pp. 212-31. (Reprint of 
introduction to L. A. Burd's edition of the Prince of 
Machiavelli.) 1907. 

John Morley: Miscellanies, 4th series. 1908. 1 ff. "Mach- 
iavelli." 

Dr. Armaingaud: Montaigne Pamphletaire. L'^nigme du 
Contr'un. 1910. 

J. Jastrow: "Kopernikus' Miinz- und Geld-theorie. " Ar- 
chiv filr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolifik, xxxviii, 734 
ff. 1904. 

K. Kautsky: Communism in Central Europe in the Time of 
the Reformation. 1897. 

E. Jenks: A Short History of English Law. 1912. 

A. Esmein: Histoire du Droit Frangais.^ 1905. (And later 
editions). 

R. Schroder: Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte.^ 1907. 

Walter Platzhoff : Die Theorie von der Mordbefugnis der Oh- 
rigkeit im XVl. Jahrhundert. Ebinger's Historische 
Studien, 1906. 

0. H. Pannkoke: ''The Economdc Teachings of the Refor- 
mation." In a collection of essays entitled Foiir Hun- 
dred Years, 1917. 

G. SchmoUer: Zur Geschiehte der nationalokonomischen An- 
sichten in Deutschland wdhrcnd der Reformationsperiode. 
1860. 

F. G. Ward: DarsteUung und Wiirdigung der Ansichten 

Luthers iiher Stoat und Gesellschaft. 1898. 

§ 4. Science. 

J. P. Richter: The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. 2 

vols. 1883. 
Les Manuscrits de Leonard de Vinci de la hihliotheque de 

VInstitut. Publics en facsimile avec transcription lit- 

terale, traduction frangaise , . . par Ch. Ravaisson- 

Molien. 6 vols. 1881-91, 



790 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Leonardo da Vinci's note-hooks; arranged and rendered into 
English by E. McCurdy. 1906. 

Leonardo de Vinci: Notes et Dessins sur la Generation. 
1901. 

Leonard de Vinci : Feuillets inedits conserves a Windsor. 22 
vols. 1901 ff. 

Instituto di Studi Vinciani: — Per il IV o centenario delta 
morte di Leonardo da Vinci. 1919. 

A. C. Klebs: Leonardo da Vinci and Ms anatomical studies. 
1916. 

Hieronymi Cardani: Opera Omnia. 1663. 10 vols. 

W. W. R. Ball: A Short Account of the History of Mathe- 
matics. 1901. 

M. Cantor: Vorlesungen iXher Geschichte der Mathematik. 
Vol. 2 (1200-1668). 1900. 

H. G. Zeuthen: Geschichte der Mathematik in 16. und 17. 
Jahrhundert. 1903. 

Articles, "Algebra" and "Mathematics" in Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. 

Maximilien Marie: Eistoire des sciences mathematiques et 
physiques, vols. 2 and 3. 1883-4. 

F. Cajori: History of Mathematics.^ 1919. 

David E. Smith : Rara arithmetica. A catalogue of the arith- 
metics written before the year MDCI, with a description 
of those in the library of G. A. Plimpton. 1908. 

F. Dannemann: Grundriss einer Geschichte der Naturwissen- 
schaften.\ 2 vols. 1902. 

W. A. Locy: Biology and its makers.^ 1915. 

W. A. Locy: The 3Iadn Currents of Zoology. 1918. 

E. L. Greene: Landmarks of Botanical History. Part 1. 

1909. (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 54). 
J. V. Cams : Geschichte der Zoologie his auf Joh. Milller und 
Ch. Darwin. 1872. 

F. Cajori : A History of Physics in Its Elementary Branches. 

1899. 
Conradi Gesneri Historiae Animalidim, libb. iii, 3 vols. 1551-8. 
Wm. Gilbert . . . on the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies . . . 

a translation by P. P. Mottelay. 1893. 
E. Gerland: Geschichte der Physik von den altesten Zeiten 

his zum Ausgange des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. 1913. 

(Work of high philosophical and scientific value). 
J. C. Brown : A History of Chemistry from the Earliest Times 

Till the Present Day. 1913. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 791 

F. J. Moore: A History of Chemistry. 1918. 

T. E. Thorpe: A History of Chemistry. 2 vols. 1909-10. 

Quaestiones Novae in Lihelhim de Sphaera Johannis de Sa- 

cro Bosco, collectae ah Ariele Bicardo. Wittenberg, 1550. 

(Library of Mr. G. A. Plimpton, New York). 
S. Gunther: Geschichte der Erdkunde. 1904. 
Articles, ''Geography" and "JMkp" in Encyclopcedia Britan- 

nica. 
L. Gallois: Les geographes allemands de la Renaissance, 

1890. 
N. Copernici De Bevolutionihus orhium cwlestium libri vi. 

(First edition 1513; I use the edition of Basle, 1566). 
L. Prowe: Nikolaus Coppernicus. 3 vols. 1883-4. (Stan- 
dard). 
Wohlwill: ' * Melanchthon und Kopernicus," in Mitteilun- 

gen ziir Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwiss&n- 

schaften, iii, 260, 1904. 
Luther on Copernicus, Bindseil: Lutheri Colloquia, 3 vols. 

1863-66, vol ii, p. 149. (This is the best text; the 

stronger form of the same saying, in which Luther called 

Copernicus a fool, seems to have been retouched by Auri- 

f aber) . 
A. D. White: The Warfare of Science and Theology, 2 vols. 

1896. Vol. i, pp. 114 ff. 
A. Miiller: Nikolaus Copernicus. 1898. 
Dorothy Stimson: The Gradual Acceptance of the Coperni- 

can Theory of the Universe. 1917. (Excellent). 
W. W. Bryant: History of Astronomy. 1907. 
Article, "Navigation," in Encyclopcedia Britannica. 

§ 5. Philosophy 

The Works of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli, &c. 
The Workes of Sir Thomas More, 1557. (Passage quoted, 

p. 329h). 
De Trinitatis Erroribus per M. Servetum'. (Printed, 1531; 

I use the MS copy at Harvard). 
M. Serveti Christianismi Restitutio. (I use the MS copy at 

Harvard). 
E. F. K. Miiller: Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten 

Kirche. 1903. 
Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, translated by 

T. A. Buckley. 1851. 



792 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Thomas Cajetan's commentarj^ on Atiuinas, in the standard 
edition of the Summa, 1880 ff. 

Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated into English 
by J. Donovan. 1829. 

Altensteig: Lex^icon Theologicum. 1583. 

A. Harnack: A History of Dogma, translated from the third 
edition by N. Buchanan. 7 vols. 1901. 

A. Harnack: Lehrhuch der Dogmengeschichte.* 1910. Vol. 
iii. 

E. Troeltsch: Geschichte der christlichen Religion. 1909. 
(Kultur der Gegenwart). 

R. M. Jones: Spiritual Reformers of the 16th and 17th Cen- 
turies. 1914. 

0. Ritschl: Dogmengeschichte des Protestantisms^, i, ii, 
Iliilfte, 1912. 

A. C. McGiffert: Protestant Thought before Kant. 1911. 

J. Gottschick: Luther's Theologie. 1914. 

Francis Bacon: Novum Organum, Bk. I, aphorisms xv, Ixv, 
and Ixxix; Essays i, (Truth), iii, (of Unity in Reli- 
gion), XXXV, (Prophecy). Advancement of Learning, 
Bk. ix. 

Montaigne's Essays, passim (numerous editions and excellent 
English translation by Florio). 

"W. Lyly: Euphues and Atheos (edited by E. Arber, 1904). 

R. Ascham: The Schmlmaster. 1761. 

Janssen-Pastor^^ ii, 461 f (on the Godless Painters of Nurem- 
berg; cf. also M. Thausing: A DUrer, translated by F. 
A. Eaton. 1882, ii, 248 f.) 

!Fran§ois Rabelais: Oeiwres (numerous editions and transla- 
tions). 

J. M. Robertson: A Short History of Freethought.^ 2 vols. 
1906. 

Colloque de Jean Bodin des Secrets cachez et des Choses Sub- 
limes. Traduction francaise du Colloquium Heptaplo- 
nicres, par R. Chauvire. 1914. 
F. von Bezold: "Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres und 
der Atheismus des 16. Jahrhunderts," Ilistorische Zeit- 
schrift, cxiii, 260-315. 
Jordani Bruni Opera, ed. Fiorentino. 3 vols. 1879-91. 

Giordano Brunos Oesammelte Werke, verdeutscht iind er- 
Idutcrt von L. Kuhlenbech. 6 vols. 1907-10. 

W. Boulting: Giordano Bruno: His Life, Thought and Mar- 
tijrdom. (1916). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 793 

L. Kuhlenbeck: Giorduno Bruno, seine Lehre von Gott, von 

dcr Vnsterhlichkeit und von der Will ens freiheit. 1913. 
W. Pater: Gaston de ki Tour. 1896. 
J. R. Charbonnel: L'£:thiqu6 de Giordano Bruno et le deux- 

iime dialogue de Spaccio, traduction. 1919. 
J. Owen: The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissances 1893. 
J. Owen: The Skeptics of the French Kenaissarice. 1893. 
A. M. Fairbairn: "Tendencies of European Thought in the 

Age of the Reformation," Cambridge Modern History, 

ii, chap. 19. 
Allegemeine Geschichte der Philosophie. (Kultur der Ge- 

genwart, Teil i, Abt. V.) 1909. W. Windelband: Die 

neuere Philosophie. 

E. Cassirer: Das Erkenntnisprohlem in der Philosophie und 

Wissenschaft der neuen Ze^it. Vol. i.- 1911. (Ex- 
cellent. Fii-st edition, 1906-7). 

R. Adamson: A Short History of Logic. 1911. 

H. Hoffding: A History of Modern Philosophy. English 
translation. 2 vols. 1900. 

R. Eucken: The Problenv of Human Life as Viewed by the 
Great Thiyikers. English translation. 1909. 

J. M. Baldwin: Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. 
8 vols. 1901-5. 

J. R. Charbonnel: La pensee italienne au XVIe siccle. 1919. 

A. Bonilla y San Martin : Luis Vives y la filosofia del renaci- 
m,iento. 1903. 

CHAPTER XIII 

THE TEMPER OP THE TIMES 

§ 1. Tolerance and Intolerance 

Lord Acton: The History of Freedom. 1907. ''The Protest- 
ant Theory of Persecution," pp. 150-187. (Essay writ- 
ten in 1862). 

F. Ruffini: Religious Liberty, translated by J. P. Heyes. 

1912. 
K". Paulus: Protestant ismus und Toleranz. 1912. 
S. L. Burr: "Anent the ^Middle Ages." American Historical 

Revietv. 1913, pp. 710-726. 
P. Wappler: Die Stellung Kursachsens und Philipps von 

Hcssen zur Tiiuferbewegung. 1910. 
^ncyclopcedia of Religion and Ethics, ix, s. v. "Persecution." 



794 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

S. Castellion : Traite des Heretiques. A savoir, si on les doit 
persecuter. Ed. A. Olivet. Geneve. 1913. 

P. Wappler: Inqwisition und Ketzerprozess zu Zwickau. 
1908. 

J. A. Faulkner: ''Luther and Toleration," Papers of Ameri- 
can Church History Society, Second Series, vol. iv, pp. 
129 ff. 1914. 

K. Volker: Toleranz und Intoleranz im Zeitalter der Refor- 
mation. 1912. 

W. E. H. Lecky: A History of the Rise and Influence of the 
Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. 2 vols. 1865. chapter iv, 
"Persecution" (in vols. 1 and 2 both). 

Erasmi opera, 1703, ix, 904 ff. Proposition iii. 

H. Hermelinck: Der Toleranzgedanke. 1908. 

The Workes of Sir Thomas More, 1557, pp. 274 ff. (A Dia- 
logue of Sir Thomas More, 1528). 

Montaigne: Essays, Book ii, no. xix. 

A. J. Klein: Intolerance in the Reign of Elizabeth. 1917. 

R. Lewin: Luther's Stellung zu den Juden. 1911. 

R. H. Murray: Erasmus and Luther: their attitude to Tol- 
eration. 1920. 

§ 2. Witchcraft 

Papers of the American Historical Association, iv, pp. 237-66. 

Bibliography of witchcraft by G. L. Burr. 
N. Paulus: Hexenwahn und Hexenprozess, vornehmlich im 

16. Jahrhundert. 1910. 
G. L. Burr: The Witch Persecutions. Translations and Re- 
prints issued by the University of Pennsylvania, vol. 3, 

no. 4, 1897. 
G. L. Burr: The Fate of Dietrich Flade. 1891. 
J. Hansen: Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im 

Mittelalter, und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfol- 

gung. 1900. 
F. von Bezold: "Jean Bodin als Okkultist und seine Demon- 

omanie." Historische Zeitschrift, cv. 1 ff. (1910). 
Gosson: The School of Abuse (1578), ed. E. Arber, 1906, p. 

60. 
De Praestigiis demonum . . . authore Joanne Wiero . . . 

1564. 
Johannis Wieri: De lamiis. 1582. 
Reginald Scott: The Discoverie of Witchcraft, wherein the 

Lewde dealing of Witches and Witchmongers is notably 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 795 

detected . . . whereunto is added a Treatise upon the 
Nature and Substance of Spir^its and Devils. 1584. Re- 
printed by B. Nicholson, 1886. 

W. Notestein: A History of Witchcraft in England 1558- 
1718. 1911. 

V. E. H. Lecky: A History of the Rise and Influence of the 
Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. 2 vols. 1865. Vol. 1, 
chaps, i, and ii. 

lontaigne: Essays, vol. iii, no. xi. 

[. C. Lea: A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. 
Vol. iii, 392 ff. 

K L. Kittredge: *'A Case of Witchcraft," American His- 
torical Review, xxiii, pp. 1 ff, 1917. 

!. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des ro- 
mischen Katholizismus.^ 1911. p. 182. (Bull, Summis 
desiderantes) . 

r. Roskoff: Geschichte des Teufels. 1869. 

L. Graf: II diavolo. 1889. 

[. C. Lea: The Inquisition in Spain, 1907, vol. iv, chaps. 8 
and 9. 

Hatutes of the Realm, 5 Eliz. 16 : An Act agaynst Inchant- 
mentes and Witcheraftes. (1562-3). 

?. de Cauzons : La Magie et la Sorcellerie en France. 4 vols. 
(1911). 

1. Klinger: Luther iind der deutscheVolksal>erglauhe. 1912. 
{Palaestra, vol. 56). 

§ 3. Education 

llhum AcademicB Vitehergensis 1502-1602, Band I, ed. K. E. 
Forstemann, 1841. Band ii, 1895. Band iii Indices, 
1905. (Reprint of vol. i, 1906). 

'. C. H. Weissenborn : Alden der Erfurter Universitdt. 3 
vols. 1884. 

I-. Buchanan: "Anent the Reformation of the University of 
St. Andros," in Buchanan's Vernacular Writings, ed. P. 
Hume Brown, 1892. 

"he Statutes of the Faculty of Arts and of the Faculty of 
Theology at the Period of the Reformation, of St. An- 
drews' University, ed. R. K. Hannay, 1910. 

i. Hartf elder: Melarichthoniana pa'dogogica. 1895. 

\ V. N. Painter: Luther on Education, including a historical 
introduction and a translation of the Reformer's two 
most important educational treatises. 1889. 



796 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Mandament der Keyserlijcker Mmesteit, vuytghegeven int 
Jaer xlvi. Louvain. 1546, (100 facsimiles printed for 
A. M. Huntin^on at the De Vinne Press, N. Y., 1896. 
Contains lists of books allowed in schools in the Nether- 
lands), 

C. Borgeaud: Histdire de V Umversite de Geneve. 2 vols. 
1900, 1909. 

J. M. Hofer: Die Stellung des Des. Erasmus und J. L. Yives 
zur Pddagogik des Quintilian. (Erlangen Dissertation). 
1910. 

F. Watson: Vives and the Renascence education of Women. 
1912. 

P. Monroe: Cyclopedia of education. 5 vols. 1912-3. 

K. A. Schmid : Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang his auf 
unserer Zeit. 5 vols, in 7. 1884-1902. (Standard), 

A. Zimmermann: Die Universitdten Englands im 16. Jahr- 
hundert. 1889. 

A. Zimmermann: England's ''offentliche Schulen" von der 
Reformation his zur Gegenwart, 1892 (Stimmen aus 
Maria-Lach. vol. 56). 

F. P. Graves: A History of Education during the Middle 

Ages and the Transition to Modern Times. 1910. 
*'Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitaten in friiherer 

Zeit," Deutsches Wochenhlatt, 1897, pp. 391 ff. 
P. Monroe : A Text-Book of the History of Education. 1905. 

(Standard text-book). 
W. S. Monroe: A Bibliography of Education. 1897. 

G. Mertz: Das 8chulwesen der deutschen Reformation. 
1902. 

P. Paulsen : Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts in Deutsch- 
land.^ 2 vols. 1896-7. 

"W. Sohm: Die Schule Johann Sturms. 1912. 

J. Picker: Die Anfdnge der akademischen Studien in Strass^ 
hurg. 1912. 

Shakespeare's England, 1916. 2 vols. ch. 8 "Education" by 
Sir J. E. Sandys. 

A. Koersch: L' Humanisme helge d I' epoque de la Renais- 
sance. 1910. 

Sir T. Elyot: The hoke named the governour. 1531. (New 
edition by H. H. S. Croft. 2 vols. 1880). 

Melanchthonis opera omnia, xi, 12 ff. * ' Declamatio de cor- 
rigendis adolescentise studies." (1518). 

Jl. Ascham: The Schole Master. 1571. (I use the reprint 



i 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 797 

in the English Works of R. Ascham, ed. J. Bennet, 1761). 
M. Fournier: Les Statuts et Privileges des Universites fran- 

gaises depuis leur fondation jusqu'en 1789. 4 vols. 

1890-4. 
F. Bacon: The Advancement of Learning, Book ii. 
Elizabethan Oxford: reprints of rare tracts ed. by C. Plumer. 

1887. 
Grace hook A containing records of the University of Cam- 
bridge 1542-89, ed. by J. Venn. 1910. 
Registres des proces-verbaux de la Faculte de theologie de 

Paris, pub. par A. Clerval. Tome I. 1917. (1505-23). 
J. H. Lupton: A Life of John Colet, new ed. 1909. (First 

printed 1887. On St. Paul's School, pp. 169, 271 ff.) 
W. H. Woodward: Des. Erasmus concerning the Aim and 

Method of Education. 1904. (Fine work). 
F. P. Graves: Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation 

of the 16th Century. 1912. 
Encyclopcedia Britannica, articles *' Universities" and 

"Schools." 
Altamira y Crevea: Historia de Espana,^ iii, 532 ff. (1913). 

F. Gribble: The Romance of the Cambridge Colleges. 

(1913). 
J. B. Mullinger: A History of the University of Cambridge. 
1888. 

G. C. Brodrick: A IDistory of the University of Oxford. 

1886. 
C. Headlam: The Story of Oxford. 1907. 
W. H. Woodward: Studies in Education during the Age of 

the Renaissance 1400-1600. 
A. Bonilla y San Martin: Luis Vives y la filosofia del renaci- 

mienio. 1903. 
A. Lef ranc : Histoire du. College de France depuis ses origines 

jitsqu' a la fin du premier empire. 1893. 
P. Feret: La Facidte de Theologie de Paris, ^poque 

Moderne. 7 vols. 1900-10. 
W. Friedensbuxg : Geschichte der Universitdt Wittenberg. 

1918. 
§ 4. Art 

Very fine reproductions of the works of the principal 
painters of the time are published in separate volumes of the 
series, Klassiker der Kunst in Gesamtausgaben, Deutsche Ver- 
lags-Anstalt, Stuttgart und Leipzig. A brief list of standard 
criticisms of art, many of them well illustrated, follows: 



798 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

K. Woermann: Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und 

Volker. Band 4.- 1919. 
S. Reinach: Apollo.'^ 1907. (Also English translation. 

Marvelously compressed and sound criticism). 
J. A. Symonds: T'he Italian Renaissance. The Fine Arts. 

1888. 
L. Pastor: History of the Popes. (Much on art at Rome, 

passim). 
B. Berenson: North Italian Painters of the Renaissance. 

1907. 
B. Berenson: Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. 

1897. 
B. Berenson: The Venetian Painters of the Renmssance.^ 

1902. 

B. Berenson: The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance."^ 

1903. 

Giorgio Vasari: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculp- 
tors and Architects, newly translated by G. du C. de Vere, 
10 vols. 1912-14. (Other editions). 

R. Lanciani: The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome. 
1907. 

E. Mlintz: Histoire de V art pendant la Renaissance. 3 vols. 
1889-95. 

J. Crowe and (J. Cavalcaselle: History of Italian Painting. 
1903 ff. 

L. Dimier : French Painting in the Sixteenth Century. 1904. 

L. F. Freeman: Italian Sculptors of the Renaissance. 1902. 

H. Janitschek: Geschichte der deutschen Malerei. 1890. 

H. A. Dickenson: German Masters of Art. 1914. 

E. Bertaux: Rome de V avenement de Jules II a nos jours."^ 
1908. 

M. Reymond: L' Education de Leon^ard. 1910. 

W. Pater: "Leonardo da Vinci," in the volume called The 
Renaissance, 1878. (Though much attacked this is, in 
my opinion, the best criticism of Leonardo). 

S. Freud: Leonardo da Vinci. 1910. 

W. von Seidlitz: Leonardo da Vinci. 2 vols. 1909. (Ex- 
cellent). 

Osvald Siren: Leonardo da Vinci. 1916. 

Leonardo da Vinci: A treatise on painting, translated from 
the Italian by J. F. Rigaud. London. 1897. 

C. J. Holmes: Leonardo da Vinci. Proceedings of the 

British Academy. 1919. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 799 

E. Miintz: Raphael, sa vie, son oeiivre et son temps. 1881. 
W. Pater: "Raphael," in Miscellaneous Studies, 1913. 

(First written 1892; fine criticism). 
Edward McCurdy: Raphael Santi. 1917. 
H. Grimm: Life of Michael Angelo, tr. by F. E. Bunnett. 

2 vols. New ed. 1906. 
Crowe and Cavalcasselle : Life and Times of Titian. 1877, 
H. Thode: Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance. 5 

vols. 1902-13. 
L. Dorez: ''Nouvelles recherches sur Michel- Ange et son en- 
tourage," Bibliotheque de V Ecole des Chartes. Vol. 

77, pp. 448 ff. (1916), vol. 78, pp. 179 ff. (1917). 
Romain Roland: Vie de Michel- Ange.'^ 1913. 
The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, translated into 

English by J. A. Symonds, (IMy copy, Venice, has no 

date). 
R. W. Emerson : Essay on Michaelangelo. 
A. Diirer's Schriftliche Nachlass, ed. E. Heidrich. 1908. 
M. Thausing: A. Dilrer.^ 1876. (English translation from 

1st ed. by F. A. Eaton. 1882). 
Alhrecht Dilrers Niederldndische Reise, hg. von J. Veth und 

8. Miiller. 2 vols. 1918. 
A. B. Chamberlain: Hans Holbein the Younger. 2 vols. 

1913. 
A. Michel: Histoire de V art depuis les premiers temps 

Chretiens jusqu' a nos jours. 3 vols. 1905-8. 
C. H. Moore: The Character of Renaissance Architecture. 

1905. 
R. Bloomfield: A History of French Architecture from the 

Reign of Charles VIII till the death of Mazarin. 2 vols. 

1911. 

§ 5. Belles Lettres 

Note: The works of the humanists, theologians, biblical 
and classical scholars, historians, publicists and philosophers 
have been dealt with in other sections of this bibliography. 
Representative poets, dramatists and writers of fiction for 
the century (up to but not including the Age of Shakespeare 
in England or of Henry IV in France) are the following: 
Italian : Ariosto, A. F. Grazzini, M. Bandello, T. Tasso, 

Berni, Guarini. 
French: Margaret of Navarre, C. Marot, Rabelais, Joachim 

du Bellay, Ronsard, Montaigne. 



800 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

English: Lyndesay, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, anonymous 
poets in Tottel's Miscellany, Sidney, E. Spenser, Donne, 
Lyly, Heywood, Kyd, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nash, Mar- 
lowe. 

German: Hans Sachs, Fischart, T. Mumer, anonymous Till 
Eulenspiegel and Faustbuch, B. Waldis. 

Spanish: The Picaresque novel, La vida de Lazarillo de 
Tonnes y de sus fortunas y adversidades. 

Portuguese : Camoens. 
As it is not my purpose to give even a sketch of literary 

history, but merely to illustrate the temper of the times from 

the contemporary belles lettres, only a few suggestive works 

of criticism can be mentioned here. 

H. Hallam: Introductioii to the Literature of Europe in the 
1.5th, 16th and 17th Centuries. 1838-9. (Old, but still 
useful). 

J. A. Symonds: Italian Literature. 1888. 

G, Lanson: Histoire de la litterature frangaise.^ 1906. 

C. H. C. Wright: A History of French Literature. 1912. 

C. Thomas: A History of German Literature. 1909. 

E. Wolff: Faust und Luther. 1912. 

The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, Renais- 
sance and Reformation. 1908. 

J. J. Jusserand: Histoire Litteraire du Peuple Anglais. 
Tome ii, De la Renaissance a la Guerre Civile. 1904. 
(Also English translation; a beautiful work). 

Winifred Smith: The Commedia delV Arte. 1912. (Nota- 
ble). 

A. Tilley : The Literature of the French Renaissance. 2 vols. 
1904. 

CHAPTER XIV 

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED 

The purpose of the following list is not to give the titles of 
all general histories of the Reformation, but of those books 
and articles in which some noteworthy contribution has been 
made to the philosophical interpretation of the events. Many 
an excellent work of pure narrative character, and many of 
those dealing with some particular phase of the Reformation, 
are omitted. All the noteworthy historical works published 
prior to 1600 are listed in tlie bibliography to Chapter XII, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 801 

section 2, and are not repeated here. The chronological order 

is here adopted, save that all the works of each writer are 

grouped together. In every case I enter the book under the 

year in which it first appeared, adding in parentheses the 

edition, if another, which I have used. 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Essay Iviii; also Essays i, iii, 
XXXV; Novum Organum Bk. i, aphorisms xv and Ixv; Ad- 
vancement of Learning, Bk. ix, and i. 

Tacques-Auguste de Thou (Thuanus) : Historiae siti temporis. 
1604-20. 

Hngo Grotius: Annales et historiae de rehus helgicis. 1657. 
(Written 1611 ff). 

William Camden: Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hiherni- 
carum regnante Elizahetha. Pars I, 1615 ; Pars II, 1625. 

Agrippa d' Aubigne : Efistaire Universelle. 1616-20. 

Paolo Sarpi: Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. 1619. (P. 
Sarpi: Histoire du Concile du Trente, French transla- 
tion by Amelot de la Houssaie. 1699). 

Arrigo Caterino Davila: Storia delle guerre civili di Francia. 
1630. 

QiuHo Bentivoglio: Guerra di Fiandria. 1632-39. 

Famiano Strada: De hello belgico decades duo. 1632-47. 

Frangois Eudes, [called] de Mezeray: Histoire de France. 
1643-51. 

David Calderwood (1575-1650) : History of the Kirk of Scot- 
land, ed. T. Thompson, 1842-9. 

Lord Herbert of Cherbury: Life and Reign of Henry VIII. 
1649. 

Thomas Fuller: Church History, 1655. (Ed. Brewer, 6 vols. 
1845). 

I. Harrington: Oceana, 1656. (Harrington's Works, 1700, 
pp. 69, 388). 

Sforza Pallavicino: Istoria del Concilio di Trento. 1656-7. 

Annales ecclesiastici . . . aiictore Reynaldo, ed. J. D. Mansi. 
Tomi 33-35. Lucaeu 1755. (Oderic Reynaldus, who 
died 1671, was a continuator of Baronius, covering the 
period in church history 1198-1565). 

Jean Claude: Defense de la Reformation. . . . 1673. (Eng- 
lish translation: An historical defense of the Reformation. 
1683). 

Gilbert Burnet : History of the Reformation of the Church of 
England. 3 vols. 1679, 1681, 1715. (Ed. by Pocock, 
6 vols. 1865ff). 



802 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Louis Maimbourg: Histoire du Lutherawisme. 1680, 
Pierre Jurieu: Histoire du Calvinisme et celle du Papisme 

mises en parallele. 1683. (English translation, 2 vols. 

1823). 
Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf: Commeniarius Mstoricus et 

apologeticus de Luther anismo. 1688-92. 
Jacques Benigne Bossuet: Histoire des variations des eglises 

protestantes. 1688. (I have used the editions of 1812 

and 1841). 
Pierre Bayle : Dictionnaire hisiorique et critique, 1697., s. v. 

''Luther," "Calvin," &e. 
Gabriel Daniel: Histoire de France. 1703. 
Jeremy Collier: Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols. 1708-14. (ed. 

Lathbury, 9 vols. 1852). 
Eapin Thoyras: Histoire d' Angleterre. 1723ff. 
Johann Lorenz Mosheim: Institutiones historiae christianae 

rec67itiores. 1741. 
Montesquieu: Esprit des Lois, 1748, Livre xxiv, chaps. 2, 5, 

25 ; Livre xxv, chap. 2, 6, 11. 
Frederick II (called The Great) of Prussia: De la Supersti- 
tion et de la Religion. 1749. (Oeuvres, 1846, i, 204 ff). 
Voltaire: Essai sur les moeurs et I' esprit des nations, et sur 

les principaux faits de I' histoire depuis Charlemagne 

jusqu'd Louis XIII. 1754. (Cf. also a passage in his 

Dictionnaire philosophique). 
David Hume: History of England from the Invasion of 

Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688. The volumes on 

the Tudor period came out in 1759. 
William Kobertson : A History of Scotland. 1759. 
William Robertson: History of the Reign of the Emperor 

Charles V. 1769. 
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Romxin Empire. 

1776-88. (On the Reformation, chap, liv, end). 
Encyclopedic, 1778, s.v. " Lutheranisme. " (Anonymous ar- 
ticle). 
Johann Gottfried von Herder: Das Weimarische Gesanghuch, 

1778, Vorrede. 
Herder: Brief e das Studium der Theologie hetreffend, 1784. 

(Samtliche Werke, Teil 14). 
Herder: Brief e zur Beforderung der Humanitdt, 1793-7. 

(Samtliche Werke, Teil 14). 
Michael Ignaz Schmidt: Geschichte der Deutschen. Aeltere 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 803 

Geschielite (to 1544), 1778 ff. Neuere Gescliiclite (1544- 
1660), 1785 fie. 

Jakob Gottlieb Planck : Geschielite des protestantischen Lehr- 
hegriffs, 6 vols. 1783-1800. 

[M. J. A. N. de Caritat, Marquis] De Condorcet: Esqvlisse d'un 
tableau historique des Progres de V Esprit humain. 1794. 
(I use the fourth edition, 1798, pp. 200 &.) 

F. A. de Chateaubriand : Essai historique sur les Revolutions, 
1797. (Oeuvres, 1870). 

Chateaubriand: Analyse raisonnee de V histoire de France. 
(Oeuvres, 1865, Tome 8). 

Friedrich von Hardenberg (called Novalis) : Die Christen- 
heit Oder Europa, 1799 (Novalis' Sehriften hg. von Minor, 
1907, Band ii. Also English translation). 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) : SdmtUche Werke, 
Jubilaumsausgabe, no date, Stuttgart and Berlin, i, 242 
and ii, 279, and other obiter dicta for which see the ex- 
cellent index. See also Gespraehe mit Eckermann, 1832, 
English translation in Bohn s library, p. 568. 

Friedrich Schiller: Geschichte des Ahfalles der Vereinigten 
Niederlandc vo7i der spanischen Regierung. 1788. (2d 
ed., much changed, 1801; translation in Bohn's library). 
Cf. also Schiller's letter to Goethe, Sept. 17, 1800, in 
Schiller's Brief e, hg. von F. Jonas, 1895, vi, 200. 

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813). His opinion, in 1801 
is given in Diary &c of Henry Crahh Robinson, ed. T, 
Sadler, 3 vols., 1869, i, 109, and in " Charakteristik 
Luthers," in Pantheon der Deutschen, 1794. 

Charles de Villers: Essai sur V esprit et I'infliience de la Re- 
forme de Luther. 1803. (English translation by James 
Mill, 1805). 

William Roscoe : Life and Pontificate of Leo X. 1805. 

J. G. Fichte: Reden an die deutsche Nation, 1808. Nr. 6. 

Mme. de Stael: De VAllemagne. 1813. 

E. M. Arndt: Ansichten und Aussichten der deutschen Ge- 
schichte. 1814. 

Arndt: Vojn Worte und voni Kirchenliede. 1819. 

Arndt: Christliches und Tilrkisches. 1828, pp. 255 ff. 

Arndt: Vergleichende Volker geschichte. 1814. 

Friedrich von Schlegel: Geschichte der alten und neuen Lit- 
eratur. 1815. (Samtliche Werke, 1822, ii, 244 fiP). 

Schlegel: Philosophic der Geschichte. 1829. (English 
translation in Bohn's Library). 



804 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Joseph de Maistre: De I'eglise gallicane. 1820, cap. 2. 
(Oeuvres, 1884, ii, 3 ff). 

De Maistre: Lettres sur I'Inquisition espagnole. 1815 ff. 
(Oeuvres ii), 

John Lingard: History of England, vols. 4, 5. 1820 ff, 

G. W. F. Hegel: Philosophie der Geschichte. Lectures de- 
livered first 1822-3, published as vol, ix of his Werke by 
E, Gans, 1837, (English translation by J, Sibree, 1857, 
in Bohn's Library). 

Leopold von Ranke : Geschichte der romamschen und german- 
ischenVolker von 1494-1535. Band i, (bis 1514). 1824. 
Appendix: Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber. 

Ranke: Die romischen Pdpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im 
XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert. 1834-6, (Many edi- 
tions and translations of this and other works of Ranke). 

Ranke: Deutsche Geschichte Hm Zeitalter der Reformation. 
1839-47. 

Ranke: Zwolf Biicher Preussischer Geschichte. Band i und 
ii, 1874. 

Ranke: Die Osmannen und die Spanische Monarchic im 16. 
und 17. Jahrhundert. 1877. 

C. H. de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon: Nouveau Chris- 
tianisme, Oeuvres, 1869, vii, 100 ff. (written 1825). 

Henry Hallam: Constitutional History of England from the 
accession of Henry VII to the death of George II. 1827. 

Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 
16th and 17th Centuries. 1837-9. 

A. Thierry: Vingt-cinq letters sur I'histoire de France. 
1827. 

Frangois-Pierre-Guillanme Guizot: Histoire de la civilisation 
en Europe. 1828. (English transl. by Hazlitt. 1846). 

Guizot: Histoire de la civilisation en France. 4 vols, 1830. 

PhiHpp Marheineke: Geschichte der deutschen Reformation. 
4 vols. 1831-4. 

Heinrich Leo: Geschichte der Niederlanden. 2 vols. 1832-5. 

Leo: Lehrbuch der Universalgeschichte, 6 vols. 1835-44. 

Friedrich von Raumer: Geschichte Europas seit dem Ende 
des 15. Jahrhundert. 1832-50. 

A. Vinet: Moralistes des 16. and 17. siecles. 1859 (Lectures 
given 1832-47). 

H. Martin: Histoire de France. 1833-6. 

Heinrich Heine: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philoso- 
phic in Deutschland. 1834. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 805 

Jules Michelet: Memoires de Luther ecrits par lui-meme, 

traduits et mis en ordre. 1835. 
Michelet et Quinet : Les Jesuites. 1842. 
Michelet: Histoire de France, vols. 8-10, 1855 ff. 
J. H. Merle d'Aubigne: Histoire de la Reformation du 16. 

siccle. 5 vols. 1835-53. (English translation, 1846). 
Thomas Babington Macauley: "On Ranke's History of the 

Popes," 1840, published in his Essays, 1842. There are 

also remarks on the effect of the Reformation in his 

History of England, 1848 ff. 
John Carl Ludwig Gieseler: Lehrhuch der Kirchengeschichte. 

Band iii, Abteilung 1, 1840. (Many later editions, and an 

English translation). 
Jaime Balmes: El protestantismo comparado con el catolic- 

ismo en sus rclaciones con la civilizacion Europea. 4 vols. 

1842-4. (English translation as, Protestantism and 

Catholicism compared, 2d ed. 1851). 
Thomas Carlyle : Heroes and Hero-worship. 1842. 
Philarete Chasle: "La Renaissance sensuelle: Luther, Rabel- 
ais, Skelton, Folengo," Revue des deux Mondes, March, 

1842. 
Edgar Quinet: Le genie des religions. 1842. 
Quinet: (see Michelet). 

Quinet: Le Christianisme et la Revolution frangaise. 1845. 
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Bollinger : Die Reformation. 3 vols. 

1846-8. 
Bollinger: Luther, eine Skizze. 1851. 
Bollinger: Kirche und Kirchen. 1861, p. 386. 
Bollinger: Vortrdge iiber die Wiedervereinigungsversuche 

zwischen den christUchen Kirchen und die Aussichten 

einer kilnftigen Union. 1872. 
F. C. Baur: Lehrhuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte. 

1847. 
Baur: Die Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreihung. 

1852. 
Baur: Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, Band iv, 1863. 
E. Forcade : "La Ref orme et la Revolution, ' ' Revue des Deux 

31 011 des, Feb. 1849. 
William Corbbett: A History of the Protestant "Reforma- 
tion" in England and Ireland, showing how that event 

has impoverished and degraded the main body of the 

People in these countries. 1852. 
Napoleon Roussel: Les nations catholiques et les nations pro- 



806 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

testantes comparees sous le triple rapport du hien-etre, 

des lumieres et de la moralitS. 1854. 
"William H. Prescott: History of the Reign of Philip II, 

King of Spain. 1855-72. 
John Lothrop Motley : The Rise of the Dutch Republic. 1855. 
Motley: History of the United Netherlands from the death 

of William the Silent to the Synod of Dort. 1860-7. 
Motley: Life and Death of John of Barneveldt. 1874. 
James Anthony Fronde: History of England from the Fall 

of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. (Later: To the 

Spanish Armada). 1856-70. 
Fronde: Short Studies on Great Subjects. 1867-83. 
Fronde: The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon. 1891. 
Fronde: The Life and Letters of Erasmus. 1894. 
Fronde: Lectures on the Council of Trent. 1896. 
Henry Thomas Bnckle: History of Civilization in England. 

1857-61. 
Paul de Lagarde: "Ueber das Verhaltnis des deutschen 

Staates zu Theolo^e, Kirche und Religion." Deutsche 

Schriften, 1886, pp. 48 &. (Written in 1859, first 

printed 1873). 
David Friedrich Stranss: Ulrich von Hutten. 1858. 
Gnstav Freytag: Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. 

1859-62. 
Ferdinand Gregorovins ; Oeschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittel- 

alter. 1859-71. 
Lord Acton: Many essays and articles, beginning about 1860, 

mostly collected in his History of Freedom and Other 

Essays, 1906, and Historical Essays and Studies, 1907. 
Acton: Lectures on Modern History. 1906. (I use the 1912 

edition; the lectures were delivered in 1899-1901). 
Acton: Letters to Mary Gladstone, ed. H. Paul, 1904. 
Jacob Burckhart: Die Cultur der Renaissance in ItaUen. 

1860. (English translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, 

1878). Twentieth ed. by L. Geiger, 1919. 
W. Stnbbs: Lectures on European History. 1904. (De- 
livered 1860-70). 
Frangois Lanrent: Etudes sur Vhistoire de Vhumanite. 18 

vols. Vol. viii: La Reforme. (No date, circa 1862). 

Vol. xvii: La Religion de Tavenir. 1870. Vol. xviii: 

Philosophie de I'histoire. 1870. (pp. 340 ff). 
John William Draper: History of the Intellectual Develop- 
ment of Europe. 1863. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 807 

Draper: History of the Conflict of Science and Beligion. 

1874. 
W. E. H. lecky: History of the Rise and Influence of the 

Spirit of Bationalism in Europe. 1865. 
K. P. W. Maurenbrecher : Karl V und die deutschen Pro- 

testanten. 1865. 
Maurenbrecher: England im Be formationszeit alter. 1866. 
Maurenbrecher: Studien U7id Skizzen zur Geschichte der Be- 

formationszeit. 1874. 
Maurenbrecher: Geschichte der katholischen Beformation. 

1880. 
Henry Charles Lea: Superstition and Force. 1866. 
Lea: Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy. 1867. 
Lea : Chapters from the Beligious History of Spain connected 

with the Inquisition. 1890. 
Lea: History of Aw^icular Confession and Indulgences in the 

Latin Church. 1896, 
Lea : History of the Inquisition in Spain. 1906-7. 
Lea: "The Eve of the Reformation," Cambridge Modern 

History, ii, 1902. 
Ludwig Hausser: Geschichte des Zeitalters der Beformation. 

1867-8. 
Frederic Seebohm: The Oxford Beformers, 1867. 
Seebohm: The Era, of the Protestant Bevolution. 1874. 
H. H. Milman : Savonarola, Erasmus and other Essays. 1870. 
Eichhoff: Dr. Martin Luther: 100 Stimmen namhafter Man- 
ner aus 4 Jahrhunderten. 1872. 
George Park Fisher: The Beformation. 1873. (New ed. 

1906). 
John Richard Green: Short History of the English People, 

1874. 
Green: History of the English People, 4 vols. 1877-80. 
John Addington Symonds: The Benaissance in Italy, 7 vols. 

1875-86. 
Symonds: "Renaissance," article in Encyclopaedia Britan- 

nica, 9th, 10th, 11th ed. 
Johannes Janssen: Geschichte des deutschen Volkcs seit dem 

Ausgange des Mittelalters, 1876-88. (Twentieth ed. of 

vols. 1, 2; eighteenth ed. of vols. 3-8, by L. Pastor, 

1913 ff). 
Emile de Laveleye: Le protestantisme et le catholicisme dans 

leurs rapports avec la liherte et la prosperite des peuples, 

1875. 



808 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Richard Watson Dixon: History of the Church of England 
from the abolition of the Roman jurisdiction, 6 vols. 1878- 
1902. 

Friedrich Nietzsche: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. 1878, 
p. 200. 

Nietzsche: Die frohliche Wissenschaft. 1882, §§ 35, 148, 149, 
385. (And other obiter dicta, cf. Werke, vii, 401). 

Pasquale Villari: Niccold Machiavelli e i suoi tempi. 1878. 
(English transL, 1891). 

Ludwig (von) Pastor: Die kirchliche Unionshestrehungen un- 
ter Karl V, 1879. 

Pastor: Geschichte der Pdpste seit dem Ausgange des Mittel- 
alters, 7 vols. 1886-1920. (English translation of Ger- 
man vols. 1-5, making 12 vols, ed. by Antrobus and 
Kerr). 

H. M. Baird: The Rise of the Huguenots in France. 1879. 

Baird: The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre. 1886. 

Georg Christian Bernhard Piinjer: Geschichte der christlichen 
Religionsphilosophie seit der Reformation. 2 Bande. 
1880-3. (English translation of the first volume as. 
History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion from 
the Reformation to Kant, by W. Hastie. 1887). 

J. E. Thorold Rogers: History of Agricidture and Prices in 
England, vol. iv, 1882, pp. 72 ff. 

Rogers: The Economic Interpretation of History, 1888, pp. 
83 ff. 

K. W. Nitzseh: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes his zum 
Augshurger Religions friede, hg. von Matthai, 1883-5. 

Heinrich von Treitschke : ' ' Luther und die deutsche Nation, ' ' 
1883. (English translation in Germany, France, Russia 
and Islam, 1915, 227 ff. Other criticisms of the Refor- 
mation may be found in his other works, e.g., Deutsche 
Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, 1 Teil,^ 1895, pp. 86, 
391). 

Charles Beard: The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century 
in its relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge. 1883. 

A. Stern: Die Socialisten der Reformationszeit. 1883. 

Matthew Arnold: St. Paul and Protestantism. 1883. 

Adolf (von) Harnack: Martin Luther in seiner Bedeutung 
fiir die Geschichte der Wissenschaft und der Bildung. 
1883 (Fifth ed. 1910). 

Harnack : M. Luther und die Grundlegung der Reformation. 
1917. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 809 

Harnack: Lelirhiich der Dogmengcschichte, Band iii, 1890. 

(Fourth ed. 1910, and English translation by Neil Bu- 
chanan, 1897). 
Hamack: Das Wesen des Christentums. 1900. (English 

translation, What is Christianity f 1901). 
Hamack: ''Die Bedeutung der Reformation innerhalb der 

allgemeinen Religionsgeschichte, " Bcderi und Aufsdtze, 

Band ii, Teil ii, 1904. 
Hamack: "Die Reformation," Internationale Monatsschrift, 

xi, 1917. 
M. Monnier: La Reforme, de Luther a Shakespeare. (His- 

toire de la litterature moderne). 1885. 
Leo Tolstoy: Thoughts and Aphorisms. 1886-93. Tolstoy's 

AVorks, English, 1905, xix, 137 f. 
Philip Schaif: History of the Christian Church. Vol. VI, 

The German Reformation. 1888. Vol. VII, The Swiss 

Reformation. 1892. 
F. von Bezold: Die Reformation. 1890. (In Oncken's All- 

gemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen). 
F. von Bezold, E. Gotheim nnd R. Koser: Staat und Gesell- 

schaft der neueren Zeit. 1908. (Die Kultur der Gegen- 

wart, Teil ii, Abteilung V), 
William Cunningham : Growth of English Industry and Com- 
merce dur^ing the early and Middle Ages. 1890. 

(Fourth ed. 1905). 
Cunningham: Growth of English Industry and Commerce in 

Modern Times. 1882. (3d ed. 1903). 
Cunningham: Western Civilization in its Economic Aspects 

in Ancient Times. 1898. 
Cunningham: Western Civilization in its Economic Aspects 

in Modern Times. 1900. (I also have the advantage of 

having taken notes of Dr. Cunningham's lectures at 

Columbia University, November, 1914). 
Eudolph Cristoph Eucken: Die Lehensanschauungen der gros- 

scn Denker. 1890. (7th ed. 1907; English translation, 

The Problem of Human Life, by W. Hough and Boyce 

Gibson, 1909). 
F. Simmel: Soziale Differenzierung. 1890. 
Robert Flint: History of the Philosophy of History. 1893. 
C. Borgeaud: The Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and 

New England. Translated by Mrs. B. Hill. Preface 

by C. H. Firth. 1894. (First published in French 

periodicals 1890-1). 



810 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Herbert L. Osgood: "The Political Ideas of the Puritans," 

Political Science Quarterly, vi, 1 ff., 201 ff., 1891. 
WiUielm Dilthey: "Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen 

im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. ' ' Archiv fiir die Geschichte- 

der JPhilosophie, iv, (1891) 604 ff., v, (1892), 337 ff. 
Dilthey: "Die Glaubenslehre der Ref ormatoren, " Preus- 

siche Jahrbiicher, Ixxv, (1894), pp. 44 ff. 
Dilthey: "Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit 

Renaissance und Reformation." Gesammelte Schriften, 

ii, 1914. 
E. A. Freeman: Historical Essays, 4th series, 1892, 
Karl Lamprecht: Zum Verstdndnis der wirtschaftlichen und 

sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14. bis zum 

16. Jahrhundert. 1893. 
Lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte, Band 5, 1894-5. 
Otto Pfleiderer: Philosophy and Development of Beligion. 

(Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh), 1894, vol. ii, pp. 321 ff. 
Pfleiderer: "Luther as the founder of Protestant civiliza- 
tion." In Evolution and Theology, 1900, pp. 48-79. 

(Address given 1883). 
E. Belfort Bax: German Society at the Close of the Middle 

Ages. 1894. 
Bax: The Peasants* War in Germany. 1899. 
Bax: The Rise and Fall of the ATmbaptists. 1903. (Large 

portions of the three works by Bax have been reprinted 

in his German Culture Past and Present. 1915). 
Brooks Adams: The Law of Civilization and Decay. 1895. 
Brooks Adams: The New Empire. 1902, 
Karl Kautsky: Vorldufer des neuren Sozialismus, Band i, 

"Der Kommunismus in der deutsehen Reformation," 

1895. (Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the 

Reformation, transl. by J, L. and E. G. Mulliken. 1897). 
A. Berger: Die Kulturaufgaben der Reformation. 1895. 

(2 1908). 
Berger: M. Luther in kulturgeschichtlicher Darstellung, 

3 parts, 1895, 1907, 1919. 
Berger: Ursachen und Ziele der deutsehen Reformation. 

1899. 
Berger: Sind Humanismus und Protestantismus gegen- 

sdtzigf 1899. 
H. Hauser: "De I'humanisme et de la Reforme en France," 

Revue Historique, July-Aug. 1897. 
Karl SeU: "Die wissenschaftliche Aufgaben einer Geschichte 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 811 

der christlichen Religion," Freussische Jahrhiicher, 
xcviii. (1899), 12 ff. 

Sell: Christentum und Weltgeschichte seit der Reformation. 
1910. 

Sell: Der Zusammenhang von Reformation und politischer 
Freiheit. Abhandlmigen in Theologischen Arbeiten 
aus dem rheinisclien wissenschaftlichen Predigerverein. 
N. F. 12. 1910. 

John Mackinnon Robertson : A Short History of Freethmight. 
1899. (3 1915). 

Robertson: A Short History of Christianity. 1901. (^1913). 

S. N. Patten: The Developme^it of English Thought. A 
S.tudj in the Economic Interpretation of History. 1899. 
(Fanciful). 

Ferdinand Brunetiere: "L'oeuvre litteraire de Calvin." Re- 
vue des Deux Mondes, Oct 15, 1900. 

Brunetiere: "L'oeuvre de Calvin." (1901). Discours de 
C&mhat, ii, 1908, pp. 121 ff. 

Williston Walker: The Reformation. 1900. 

Walker: A History of the Christian Church. 1918. 

A. Loisy: L'Evangile et I'^glise. 1901. (Answer to Har- 
nack's AVesen des Christentums). 

A. Lang: History of Scotland, i, 1901, p. 382. 

A. F. Pollard: Henry VIII. 1902. 

A. F. Pollard: Thomas Cranmer. 1904. 

Pollard: Folitical History of England 1547-1603. 1910. 

James Gairdner: The English Church in the Sixteenth Cen- 
tury (1509-58). 1902. 

J. Gairdner: Chapters in the Cambridge Modern History, 
ii, 1902. 

Gairdner: Lollardy and the Reformation. 4 vols. 1908 ff. 

Mandell Creighton: A History of the Fapacy, vol. 5, 1902. 

E. Armstrong: The Emperor Charles V. 1902. 

H. Lemonnier: Histoire de France (ed. par E. Lavisse), v, 
1903-4. 

James Harvey Robinson: ''The Study of the Lutheran Re- 
volt," American Historical Review, viii, 205. 1903. 

J. H. Robinson: "The Reformation," Encyclopcedia Britan- 
nica, 1911. 

Auguste Sabatier: Les religions d'autorite et la religion 
de Vesprit. 1903. (* 1910. English translation 1904). 

(H. M.) Alfred Baudrillart: L'£;glise catholique, la Renais- 



812 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

sance, le Protestantisme. 1904. (English translation 

by Mrs. Philip Gibbs. 1908). 
W. H. Frere: The English Church in the Reigns of Eliza- 

heth and James I, 1904. 
H. A. L. Fisher: A Political History of England 1485-1547. 

1904. 
Fisher: The Republican Tradition in Europe, 1911, pp. 34 ff. 
J. H. Mariejol: Histoire de France (ed. par E. Lavisse), 

Tome vi, 1904. 
E. P. Cheyney: The European Background of American 

History, 1904, p. 168. 
0. Hegemann: Luther in katholischem Urteil. 1904. 
Friedrich Heinrich Suso Denifle: Luther and Luthertum in 

der ersten Entwicklung, i, 1904 ; ii, hg. von A. M. Weiss, 

1909. 
Max Weber: "Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' 

des Kapitalismus, " Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft und 

SozialpoUtik, xx and xxi, 1905. 
George Santayana: Reason in Religion, 1905, pp. 114-124. 
Santayana: Winds of Doctrine, 1913, pp. 39-46. 
Santayana: Egotism in German Philosophy, 1917, pp. 1 

ff., 23. 
P. Imbart de la Tour: Les Origines de la Reforme, 3 vols. 

1905-13. 
P. Imbart de la Tour: ''Luther et TAllemagne, " in Revue 

de metaphysique et morale, 1918, p. 611. 
David J. Hill: A History of Diplomacy in the International 

Development of Europe, vol. 2, 1906, pp. 422 f, 460. 
A. W. Benn: A History of English Rationalism in the 

Eighteenth Century, 1906, pp. 76 f. 
J. Mackinnon: A History of Modern Liberty, Vol, iii. The 

Age of the Reformation, 1906. 
T. M. Lindsay: A History of the Reformation. 2 vols. 

1906-7. 
H. Bbhmer: Luther im Lichte der neueren Forschung. 1906. 

(2d. ed. 1909, 3d 1913, 5th 1918, each much changed). 
Ernst Troeltsch: Bedeutung des Protestantismus fiir die 

Entstehung der modemen Welt. 1906. (2d ed. 1911; 

English translation, "Protestantism and Progress." 

1912). 
Troeltsch: Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der 

Neuzeit, 1906. (Kultur der Gegenwart, I, Teil iv, 1). 

2d ed. 1909. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 813 

Troeltsch: " Protestantismus und Kultur," in Die Religion 
in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1912. 

Troeltsch: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und 
Gruppen, 1912. 

Troeltsch: "Renaissance und Reformation," Histarische 
Zeitschrift, ex. 519 ff., 1913. 

Troeltsch: "Die Kulturbedeutung des Kalvinimus, " Inter- 
nationale Wochenschrift, iv, 1910. 

Troeltsch: "Luther und der Protestantismus, " Neue Bund- 
schau; Oct. 1917. 

T. Brieger: "Die Reformation." In Welt geschichte 1500- 
1648, ed. Pflugk-Harttung, 1907. (Published separately, 
enlarged, 1909). 

F. Loofs: Luther's Stellung zum Mittelalter und zur Neuzeit. 
1907. 

Horst Stephan: Luther in den Wandlungen seiner Kirche. 
1907. 

A. Kalthoff: Das Zeitalter der Reformation. 1907. 

Otto Pfleiderer: Die Entwicklung des Christ entums. 1907. 

Joseph Fabre: La pensee moderne, de Luther a Leibnitz. 
1908. 

F. Lepp: Schlagworter des Reformat ionszeitalters. 1908. 

Paul Sabatier: Les Modernist es, 1908 (Translated, Modern- 
ism, 1908, pp. 75 ff). 

Paul Sabatier: L'Orientation religieuse de la France actuelle, 
1911. (Translated, France Today, its Religious Orien- 
tation, 1913, pp. 49-51). 

John ITorley: Miscellanies, Fourth Series, 1908, pp. 120 ff. 

R. Eckert: Luther im Urteil bedeutender Manner. 1908. 
(2d ed., expanded, 1917). 

E. Boutroux: Science et religion dans la philosophie con- 

temporaine, 1908, p. 13. 
L. Zscharnack: "Reformation und Humanismus im Urteil 
der deutsehen Aufklarung," Protestantische Monat- 
shefte, 1908, xii, 81 ff, 153 ff. 

F. Rachfahl: "Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus, " Interna- 

tionale Wochetischrift, iii, 1909. 
E. Fueter : ' ' Die Weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des Calvinis- 

mus. " Wissen und Leben, ii, 1909, pp. 269 ff. 
E. Fueter: Geschichte der neueren Historiographie. 1911. 

(French translation, 1916). 
E. Fueter: Geschichte des Europdischen St aatensy stems 

1492-1559. 1919. 



814 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

W. Windelband: Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 

395. (Kultur der Gegenwart, Teil I, Abt. 5, 1909). 
Solamon Reinach: Orpheus, 1909. 

Jacob Salwyn Schapiro: Social Reform and the Reforma- 
tion. 1909. 
F. Katzer: Luther und Kant. 1910. 
Emil Knodt: Die Bedeutung Calvins und des Calvinismus 

filr die protestantische Welt. 1910. 
Jaeger: " Germanisierung des Christentums," Religion in 

Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1910. 
A. Dide: J. J. Rousseau, le Protestantisme et la Revolution 

frangaise. (1910). 
J. Rivain: Politique, Morale, Religion; Sur VE sprit pro- 

testant; Protestantisme et progres; I'^glise et V^tat. 

1910. 
C. Burdach: "Sinn und TJrsprung der Worte Renaissance 

und Reformation." Konigliche-preussische. Akademie 

der Wissensehaften, Sitzungsherichte, 1910, pp. 594-646. 
W. Kohler: Idee und Personlichkeit in der Kirchenge- 

schichte. 1910. 
W. Kohler: ''Luther," in Morgenrot der Reformation, hg. 

von Pflugk-Harttung, 1912. 
W. Kohler: Martin Luther und die deutsche Reformation. 

1916. 
W. Kohler in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1909, 

i, 2117 ff. 
Kohler: "Erasmus," 1918. (Klassiker der Religion). 
Kohler: Dr. M. Luther, der deutsche Reformator. 1917. 
H. T. Andrews: "The Social Principles and Effects of the 

Reformation." In Christ and Civilisation, ed. J. B. 

Patten, Sir P. W. Bunting and A. E. Garvie, 1910. 
Fernand Mouret: Histoire generale de I'JSglise. Tome 5. 

La Renaissance et la Reforme. 1910. (^ 1914). 
A. Humbert: Les Origines de la Theologie moderne, 1911. 
Hartmann Grisar: Luther. 3 vols. 1911-13. 
Preserved Smith: Life and Letters of Martin Luther, 1911. 

(Especially the preface to the second edition, 1914). 
Preserved Smith: "Justification by Faith," Harvard Theo- 
logical Review, 1913. 
Preserved Smith: "Luther," International Encyclopcedia, 

1915. 
Preserved Smith: "The Reformation 1517-1917." Billio- 

theca Sacra, Jan. 1918. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 815 

Preserved Smith: "English Opinion of Luther," Harvard 
Theological Review, 1917. 

Elillaire Belloc: "The Results of the Reformation." Cath- 
olic World, Jan. 1912. 

P. Wemle: Renaissance und Reformation. 1912. 

Alfred Plummer: The Continental Reformation. 1912. 

Maxime Kowalewsky: Die okonomische EntwicJdung Euro- 
pas his zum Beginn der hapitalistischen Wirtschaftsform. 
Aus dem Russischen iiberstezt von A. Stein. Vol. vi, 
1913, pp. 51 ff. 

J. B. Bury: A History of Freedom of Thought. 1913. 

&. L. Burr: "Anent the Middle Ages," American Historical 
Review, 1913. 

Burr: "The Freedom of History," American Historical Re- 
view, Jan. 1917. 

W. J. Ashley: Economic Organization of England, 1914, 
pp. 64 ff. 

A. Elkan: "Entstehung und Entwicklung des Begriffs *Ge- 
genref ormation, ' " Historische Zeitschrift, cxii, pp. 
473-93, 1914. 

E. M. Hulme: The Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution 

and the Catholic Reformation. 1914. (Second ed. 
1915). 

G. Wolf: Quellenkunde der deutschen Reformationsge- 
schichte, 2 vols. 1915, 1916. 

A. E. Harvey : ' ' Economic Self-Interest in the German Anti- 
clericalism of the 15th and 16th Centuries," American 
Journal of Theology, 1915. 

Harvey: "Economic Aspects of the Reformation," Lutheran 
Survey, Aug. 1, 1917, pp. 459-64. 

Harvey: "Martin Luther in the Estimate of Modern His- 
torians," American Journal of Theology, July, 1918. 

W. P. Paterson: "Religion," chap. 9 of German Culture, ed. 
by W. P. Paterson, 1915. 

John Dewey: German Philosophy and Politics. 1915. 

H. Cohen: Deutschtum und Judentum. 1915. 

G. Kawerau: Luther's Gedanken iiber den Krieg. 1916. 

G. Monod: "La Reforme Catholique," Revue Historique, 
cxxi, 1916, esp. pp. 314 f. 

F. S. Marvin: Progress and History, 1916. (Essays by 

various authors). 
Shailer Mathews: The Spiritual Interpretation of Historic, 
1916, esp. pp. 57 ff. 



816 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Frank Puaux: "La Reformation jugee par Claude et 
Jurieu." Bulletin de la Societe de Vhistoire du Pro- 
testantisme, Juillet-Sept. 1917. 

I. Marchaud: La Reformation: ses causes, sa nature, ses 
consequences. 1917. 

W. Weiss: "Pour le Quatrieme Centenaire de la Eeforma- 
tion," Bulletin de la Societe de I'histoire du Protest an- 
tisme, 1917, pp. 178 ff. 

K. D. Macmillan : Protestantism in Germany. 1917. 

Georg von Below: Die Ursachen der Reformation, 1917. 

H. M. Gwatkin: "Reformation," in Encyclopcedia of Re- 
ligion and Ethics, 1917. 

Alfred Fawkes: "Papacy," idid. 

Max Lenz: "Luthers weltgesehichtliche Stellung," Preus- 
sische Jahrhiicher, clxx, 1917. 

Chalfant Robinson: "Some Economic Aspects of the Pro- 
testant Reformation Doctrines." Princeton Theological 
Review, October 1917. 

Arthur Cushman McGiffert: "Luther and the Unfinished 
Reformation." Address given at Union Seminary Oct. 
31, 1917, published in the Union Seminary Bulletin, 
1918. 

Revue de Metaphysique et Morale, Sept.-Dec, 1918. Special 
number on the Reformation with important articles by 
C. A. Bemouilli, Imbart de la Tour, N. Weiss, F. Buisson, 
P. Watson, Frederic Palmer, E. Doumergue and others. 

W. K. Boyd: "Political and Social Aspects of Luther's 
Message," South Atlantic Quarterly, Jan., 1918. 

H. Scholz: "Die Reformation und der deutsche Geist." 
Preussische Jahrhiicher, clxx, 1, 1918. 

F. Heller: Luther's Religionsgeschichtliche Bedeutung. 
1918. 

F. J. Teggart: The Processes of History, 1918, pp. 162 ff. 

Lucy H. Humphrey: "French Estimates of Luther," Lu- 
theran Quarterly, April, 1918. (Interesting study). 

J. Paquier: Luther et VAllemagne. 1918. 

Wilbur Cross Abbott: The Expansion of Europe 1415-1789. 
2 vols. 1918. 

H. E. Barnes: "History," Encyclopcedia Americana, 1919. 

George Foot Moore: History of Religions: Judaism, Chris- 
tianity, Mohammedanism. 1919. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 617 

P. Hume Brown: Surveys of Scottish History. 1919. (Es- 
says posthiunously collected). 

J. Haller: Die Ursachen der Reformation. 1919. 

F. Arnold: Die deutsche Reformation in ihren Beziehungen 
zu den Kulturverhdltnissen des Mittelalters. 1919. 

D. H. Bauslin: The Lutheran Movement of the Sixteenth 
Century. 1919. 



INDEX 



Aalst, 264. 

Aberdeen, University of, 12. 

Abgarus, 585. 

Abyssinia, 405. 

Acontius, J., 627. 

Acton, Lord, 357, 377, 642, 

737, 741. 
Adams, B., 726. 
Adrian VI, Pope, 

appeal to Germany, 84 f., 

378. 
and Luther, 241, 378. 
and Inquisition, 242, 378, 

415. 
pontificate, 378 f., 389. 
in Spain, 427. 
and art, 690. 
Aerschot, Duke of, 269. 
Aeschylus, 574. 
Aesop, 574. 
Africa, 10, 437, 441, 443, 

445 f ., 473, 525, 533, 

616. 
Agriculture, 540 ff . 
Agrippa of Nettesheim, H. 

C, 420, 508, 510, 

638 f. 
Aigle, 161. 

Aix-in-Provence, 203. 
Alamanni, L., 373. 
Albertinus, A., 453. 
Albertus Magnus, 612. 
Albigenses, 35. 
Albuquerque, A. d', 443. 
Alcala, University of, 12, 400, 

565, 673. 
Aleander, J., 78, 80, 191, 195, 

241. 



819 



AlenQon, 195. 

Charles, Duke of, 189. 
Aleppo, 446. 
Alesius, A., 354. 
Alexander VI, Pope, 17 f., 

407, 418, 435, 709. 
Algiers, 449. 
Allenstein, 618. 
Almeida, F. d', 442. 
Altdorf, 670. 
Alva, Duke of, 

defeats German Protes- 
tants, 120. 
besieges Metz, 200. 
regent of the Netherlands, 

254, 257 ff., 672. 
and England, 332, 335, 

339 f. 
art of war, 488. 
Amazon, 438. 

America, 275, 407, 416, 430, 
435 ff., 457, 512, 523, 
616, 651. 
gold and silver from, 
473 ff. 
Amboise, 197. 

Tumult of, 210 f . 
Amboyna, 524. 
Ameaux, 175. 
Ammonius, A., 649. 
Amsterdam, 244, 257, 2611, 

275, 531. 
Amyot, 576. 
Anabaptists, 82. 
in Germany, 99 ff. 
and Melanchthon, 117. 
and polygamy, 120. 
in Sweden, 138, 



820 



INDEX 



Anabaptists (continued) 
in Poland, 142. 
in Transylvania, 145. 
in Switzerland, 154 ff. 
in Netherlands, 237, 243 f., 

248 f ., 295. 
in England, 295, 308, 315. 
in Italy, 376, 417. 
and Council of Trent, 392. 
and Bible, 573. 
communism, 606. 
persecuted, 644 f. 
for toleration, 646. 
judged by Bax and Kaut- 
sky, 726. 
Andalusia, 433 f. 
Andelot, 205. 
Andrea del Sarto, 680. 
Angbierra, P. M. d', 702. 
Anjou, Francis, Duke of, 
269 f., 272, 274, 602. 
Anne Boleyn, Queen of Eng- 
land, 287, 290 f ., 293, 
295, 298 f., 548, 588, 
676. 
Anne of Cleves, Queen of 

England, 306 f . 
Anne, Queen of France, 182 f . 
Anthology, 574. 
Antwerp, 237, 239 ff., 245, 
256 f ., 260, 265, 284, 
355, 442, 454, 467, 
472, 565. 
trade, 523 ff., 531 f ., 537. 
charity, 559. 
art, 683. 
Appenzell, 146. 
Aquaviva, 410. 
Aquinas, T., 34, 43, 47, 163, 

529, 590, 624. 
Arabs, 442 f., 448. 
Aragon, 428. 
Arbuthnot, A., 355. 



Archangel, 526. 
Arcimboldi, 136. 
Aretino, P., 694. 
Argyle, Earl of, 360. 
Ariosto, 11, 19, 374, 502, 

508 ff., 628, 692. 
Aristarchus, 617. 
Aristophanes, 574. 
Aristotle, 49, 52, 63 f., 66, 
513, 574, 590, 609, 
612, 617, 623. 

reaction against, 636 f. 
Armentieres, 256. 
Armstrongs, 505. 
Amdt, 718. 

Arras, League of, 271 ff. 
Art, 3, 674, 91. 

Gothic, 7. 

rewards of artists, 472. 

history of, 582 f. 

painting, 674 ff. 

architecture, 685 ff. 

Eeformation and Counter- 
reformation, 689 ff. 
Artois, 239. 
Arzila, 446. 
Ascham, R., 327, 497 f ., 634 f ., 

667 f ., 671, 692. 
Ashley, 729. 
Asia, 447 f., 474, 616. 
Aske, R., 304. 
Askewe, A., 309. 
Atahualpa, 440. 
Atlantic, 10, 442, 490, 523. 
Aubigne, M. d', 723. 
Aubigne, T. A. d', 600f. 
Augsburg, 74, 113, 128, 454. 

Diet of (1518), 46,67. 

Diet of (1530), 110, 116 ff. 

Diet of (1548), 129, 239. 

Diet of (1555), 130. 

Religious Peace of, 114, 
130 ff., 255, 650. 



INDEX 



821 



Augsburg (continued) 

Confession, 116 f., 122, 130, 
145, 299, 392. 

banks, 520 f., 527 f. 

pauperism, 559 f . 
Augustine, 34, 65, 584, 606. 
Augustinian Friars, 67, 240, 

702, 708. 
Australia, 443. 

Austria, 74 ff., 79, 146, 158, 
238. 

Rudolph IV, Duke of, 44. 

Don John of, 266 ff., 272. 

Matthew, Archduke of, 
268 ff. 
Auvergne, 202. 
Avicenna, 513. 
Avignon, popes at, 14, 42. 
Azores, 435, 441. 
Aztecs, 438 f . 

Babington, A., 338. 

Bacon, F., 392, 487, 591 f., 
609, 623, 626, 650, 
666, 669. 
on effect of the Reforma- 
tion, 635 f. 

Baden, 157, 238. 

Badius, J., 471. 

Balboa, 438. 

Baldwin, J., 635. 

Bale, J., 578. 

Balearic Isles, 535. 

Baltic, 523, 526. 

Bamberg, 114, 658. 

Bandini, P. A., 377. 

Baptista Mantuanus, 667. 

Baptists, 102. 

Barbarossa, 449. 

Barbary, 535. 

Barcelona, 428, 535. 
University of, 12, 400. 

Bamabites, 397. 



Barnes, R., 308. 
Baronius, C, 585. 
Barton, E., 290. 
Basil III, Czar, 447. 
Basle 

joins Swiss Confederacy, 
146. 

center of humanism, 147, 
150. 

Reformation, 156 f., 160, 
162. 

Council of, 15 f., 40, 45, 
147 f., 389. 

University of, 11, 149. 
Baur, F. C, 720 f . 
Bavaria, 44, 74, 114, 127, 406, 

454. 
Bax, B., 725 f . 
Baxter, R., 656, 729. 
Bayard, 501. 
Beard, C, 739. 
Beaton, D., 356 f ., 382. 
Beatus Rhenanus, 53. 
Becket, T., 59, 305. 
Beda, N., 161. 
Beirut, 446. 
Beham, B., 103, 628. 
Beham, H. S., 103, 628. 
Belgium, 76, 555. 
Belgrade, 449. 
Bellay, J. du, 576, 579. 
Bellay, M. du, 582, 704. 
Bellay, R. du, 196. 
Bellinis, 677. 
Below, G. von, 739. 
Bembo, P., 51, 374, 376. 
Benedict, St., 397. 
B.engal, 524. 
Ben Mosheh, G., 565. 
Benn, A. W., 742. 
Ber, L., 106. 
Berger, A. E., 728. 
Bernard, St., 34, 397. 



822 



INDEX 



Berne, 146 ff., 153, 157 f., 
160 f., 168 f., 179, 
645. 
Bemi, F., 376. 
Berquin, L. de, 193. 
Berthelier, P., 175. 
Berwick, 358. 
Berwickshire, 362. 
Besancon, University of, 672. 
Bessarion, 52. 
Beucklessen, 101 f . 
Beza, T., 172, 181, 213, 565, 

585, 598, 647, 671. 
Bezold, 732. 
Bible 

first printed, 9. 
number of editions, 26. 
Vulgate, 26, 188, 392, 396, 

566. 
French, 26, 175, 188, 196, 

570. 
German, 26, 81, 86, 100, 

111 f ., 157, 569 f . 
English, 37 f., 243, 284, 
289, 300, 329, 354 ff., 
359, 566, 570 f. 
Swedish, 138. 
Polish, 142. 
Greek, 147, 188, 374, 420, 

564 ff. 
Dutch, 243. 
Spanish, 245. 

new Latin translations, 
374, 565 f. 
* Italian, 374. 
Hebrew, 565. 
Complutensian Polyglot, 

565 f. 

authority of, 35, 371, 40, 

165 f., 392, 571 ff. 
exegesis and criticism of, 

566 ff. 
byYalla, 49, 566f. 



Bible (continued) 
by Lef evre, 52 f . 
by Colet, 53. 
by Reuchlin, 54. 
by Erasmus, 60, 564 ff. 
by Luther, 568 f . 
new translations con- 
demned, 192, 203, 
284, 309, 420 ff. 
price of, 468. 
popularity, 571 f. 
effect of bibliolatry, 573, 

655 f. 
illustrated by Raphael, 679. 
Biilia Pauperum, 8, 26. 
Biel, G., 160, 743. 
Bijns, A., 246. 
Bion, 574. 
Blaurer, A., 179. 
Blaurer, T., 134. 
Blaurock, G., 645. 
Blois, 197, 210. 

States General, 222. 
Blue Laws, 171 ff., 482 ff. 
Boccaccio, 47 f ., 422. 
Bodin, J., 222, 582, 601 f., 
608, 623. 
on religion, 630. 
on witchcraft, 657, 659 f , 
Boece, H., 354. 
Bohemia, 38 ff., 74, 144, 290. 
Bohemian Brethren, 40 f ., 

142, 144. 
Bohm, H., 87. 
Bohmer, 739. 
Boiardo, 376. 
Bologna, 393. 

University of, 11, 603, 613, 

618, 627. 
Concordat of, 42 f., 184, 
230. 
Bolsec, J., 167, 176, 375. 
Bombasius, 564. 



INDEX 



823 



Boniface VIII, Pope, 14, 23, 

41 f. 
Bonivard, 168. 
Bonn, 657, 
Bonner, 604. 
Books 

numbers of, 9, 691 f . 

prices of, 468. 

royalties, 471 f. 

literature, 691-8. 
Borgeaud, C, 743. 
Borgia family, 15, 676. 

Caesar, 17, 590, 676. 

Lucretia, 17, 676. 
Borgia, F., 410. 
Borneo, 524. 
Borromeo, C, 386, 417. 
Borthwick, D., 355 note. 
Bossuet, 702 f. 
Botero, J., 608. 
Bothwell, Earl of, 366 ff. 
Boucher, J., 190, 600, 605. 
Bourbon, Anthony of, 205, 

210, 213. 
Bourbon, Charles, Constable 

of, 185, 205, 380. 
Bourbon, Charles, Cardinal 

of, 223. 
Bourgeoisie, 5, 236, 278, 

549 ff. 
Bourges, 195. 

University of, 11, 162. 

Pragmatic Sanction of, 

42 f. 
Archbishop of, 227. 

Boyneburg, 313. 
Brabant, 245, 253, 255, 264, 
269, 274. 

population, 454. 
Brahe, T., 623. 
Bramante, 686. 
Brandenburg, 74, 468, 540. 

population, 454. 



Brandenburg (continued) 
Joachim I, Elector of, 77. 
Joachim II, Elector of, 119, 

127. 
Albert of. Grand Master of 

the Teutonic Order, 

113, 139. 
John, Margrave of, 398. 
Brandenburg- Culmbach, Al- 
bert of, 130. 
Brant, S., 88. 

Ship .of Fools, 54, 147. 
Brantome, 211, 350, 582, 704. 
Brask, J., 137. 
Brazil, 405, 408, 435, 444. 
Breda, 251. 
Brederode, 257. 
Brentano, 729. 
Brenz, 645. 
Brescia, 455, 565, 658. 
Brethren of the Common 

Life, 12, 26, 32. 
Briconnet, W., 180 ff. 
Brielle, 260. 
Bristol, 323. 
Brittany, 182, 195. 
Brothers of Mercy, 397. 
Browne, R., 345. 
Briick, C, 116. 
Bruges, 273, 559. 
Bruno, 507, 623, 639 f. 
Brunswick, Henry, Duke of, 

120. 
Brussels, 235, 242, 245, 253, 

255 tf., 264, 266, 268, 

272, 439, 502, 540. 
Bucer, M., 110, 120, 122, 164, 

169, 312 f ., 322, 375, 

508, 596, 645. 
Buchanan, G., 354, 579 f., 

603, 703. 
Buckingham, Duke of, 280. 
Buckle, H. T., 722. 



824 



INDEX 



Bude, W., 187, 190, 193 f., 

667, 672. 
Bugenhagen, J., 137. 
Bullinger, H., 102, 123, 150, 

160, 179, 299, 312, 

326, 356, 420, 587. 
Burckhardt, J., 732. 
Burghley, "W. Cecil, Lord, 

327, 333 f ., 337 f ., 
554, 635. 

Burgos, 457. 

Burgundy, Free County of, 

76, 234, 257, 455, 

553. 
Philip the Good, Duke of, 

234. 
Charles the Bold, Duke of, 

235. 
Burgundy (France), 186. 
Burnet, G., 701. 
Burr, G. L., 732. 
Busleiden, J., 672. 
Butts, W., 470 f . 



Cabot, S., 446. 

Cabral, 442. 

Cabrieres, 203. 

Cadiz, 341, 524 f . 

Cairo, 446. 

Cajetan, T. de Vio, Cardinal, 

46, 671, 393, 566, 

605, 624. 
Calais, 200, 281, 302, 319, 332 
Calcagnini, C, 620. 
Calderon, 433. 

Calendar, reform of the, 623 f . 
Calicut, 441 f. 
Calixtus III, Pope, 16. 
Calvin, G., 161. 
Calvin, I., 169. 
Calvin, J. : 
and Oerman Theology, 32. 



Calvin, J. (continued) 

doctrine of the eucharist, 

110, 165 f. 
and Lutherans, 134. 
and Zwingli, 134, 1591, 

166. 
and Bohemian Brethren, 

144. 
early life, 161 1 
and Erasmus, 162, 164. 
and Luther, 162, 164 1 
conversion, 162. 
Institutes of the Christian 

Religion, 162 ff., 169, 

198, 208, 645. 
doctrine of predestination, 

164 ff., 746. 
in Italy, 168, 376. 
in Geneva, 168 ff., 179. 
at Strassburg, 169. 
at Colloquy of Eatisbon, 

169. 
marriage, 169. 
■^ social reform, 170 ff., 483. 
persecutes, 175 ff., 645 1 
and Servetus, 177 1 
international position, 1791 
death and character, 180 1 
and French Reformation, 

189, 201, 2301 
and Rabelais, 1941 
and French Bible, 196. 
political theory, 211, 592, 

596 1, 604. 
influence in Netherlands, 

248. 
influence in England, 312, 

326 1, 335. 
influence in Scotland, 359. 
and Bolsec, 375. 
and Council of Trent, 392. 
and Index, 420. 
on torture, 481. 



INDEX 



825 



Calvin, J. {continued) 

on amusements, 485. 

biblical exegesis, 569, 572. 

on usury, 609. 

and free thought, 626. 

and witchcraft, 656. 

and art, 690. 

judged by Gibbon, 710 f. 

judged by Christie, 731. 
Calvinism 

barred by Peace of Augs- 
burg, 130. 

and Lutheranism, 134, 
179 f. 

in Scandinavia, 138. 

in Poland, 142 f. 

international, 179 f. 

in France, 201 ff. 

in Netherlands, 247 ff. 

in Scotland, 353. 

in Spain, 416. 

in Italy, 417. 

political effect, 594, 707. 

and Capitalism, 728 f. 
Camden, 703. 
Cambrai 

Treaty of, 186. 

Archbishopric of, 252. 
Cambridge, University of, 56, 
471, 604, 671, 687. 

and Reformation, 281 f. 
Cambridgeshire, 323. 
Camoens, 11, 444 f . 
Campanus, 626. 
Campeggio, 122. 
Canisius, P., 32, 406. 
Cano, S. del, 441. 
Canon Law, 43 f ., 69, 71, 78. 
Canossa, 43. 

Cape of Good Hope, 10, 441. 
Cape Verde Islands, 435, 

441. 
Capitalism, 3-5, 515-562. 



Capitalism (continued) 
and Reformation, 515, 

727 f., 748. 
origins, 515 ff. 
first great fortunes, 517 f. 
banking, 518 ff. 
mining, 522 f . 
commerce, 523 ff. 
manufacture, 536 ff. 
gilds, 537 ff. 
agriculture, 541 ff. 
bourgeoisie, 548 ff. 
proletariat, 552 ff. 
pauperism, 556 ff. 
Capito, W., 110, 150, 157, 189, 

508, 645. 
Cappel 
First Peace of, 158. 
battle of, 158 f . 
Capuchins, 375, 397. 
Caracci, 689. 
Caracciolo, M., 78. 
Caraffa, J. P., see Paul IV. 
Cardan, J., 610 f., 614. 
Carlstadt, A. Bodenstein of, 
69, 81, 83, 90, 108, 
120, 136, 241, 420, 
569. 
Carlyle, T., 718. 
Carpi, Berengar of, 613. 
Cartier, J., 446, 526. 
Cartwright, T., 343. 
Cassander, 248, 255. 
Castellio, S., 175, 646 f. 
Castiglione, B., 492, 501, 510. 
Castile, 412, 427 f . 
Cateau-Cambresis, Treaty of, 

200, 206, 372. 
Catechisms, 112, 142, 395, 

406 f. 
Catharine of Aragon, Queen 
of England, 279, 
2861, 290 f., 321. 



826 



INDEX 



Catharine Howard, Queen of 

England, 307. 
Catharine Parr, Queen of 

England, 307. 
Catharine de' Medici, Queen 
of France, 

marriage, 198 f. 

character, 211. 

policy, 211 ff. 

''flying squadron," 215. 

and St. Bartholomew, 217 f . 

as seen by Huguenots, 220 f . 

death, 224. 

and Pius V, 386. 

invents corsets, 497. 

and Machiavelli, 591. 

and art, 688. 

judged by Michelet, 717. 
Catholic Church (see also Pa- 
pacy and Counter- 
reformation). 

revolt from, 4, 

history in later Middle 
Ages, 13-20. 

heir of the Koman Empire, 
13, 747. 

abuses, 20 f. 

wealth, 21. 

temporal power, 29, 37, 
701 

attacked by Luther, 123, 
388. 

intolerance, 641 ff. 
Celibacy, sacerdotal, 

effect on race, 13, 453. 

vow not kept, 25. 

rejected by Wyclif, 37. 

repudiated by Luther, 71, 
81. 

in England, 306, 313. 

and Inquisition, 508. 
Cellarius, C, 561. 
Cellini, B., 504, 583, 653, 688. 



press. 



Censorship of the 
417 ff., 423 f. 
Cerdagne, 426. 
Cerratani, B., 377. 
Cervantes, 433, 692. 
Ceuta, 446. 
Ceylon, 408, 524. 
Chambre Ardente, 203 f 
Chancellor, R., 447. 
Chapuis, 288, 291. 
Charles V, Emperor, 
heir of Burgundy 
Spain, 76, 426. 
elected emperor, 77. 
crowned, 78. 
religious policy, 

116 ff., 121 f., 
322 note, 
conquers Tunis, 121. 
war with France, 

185 ff., 198, 427. 
Schmalkaldie War, 126, 

383. 
abdicates, 132, 246. 
in Netherlands, 

238. 
suppresses rebellion 

Ghent, 236 f. 
and England, 278 ff., 294, 

317 f. 
and papacy, 378 ff. 
and Inquisition, 417. 
character, 427, 498. 
betrothed to Mary Tudorj 

432. 
and Moors, 433. 
and Russia, 447. 
finance, 467. 
in Spain, 477. 
and Fuggers, 528. 
portrait, 678. 
Charles VIII, King of France, 
17, 35. 



and 



79 ff., 
236, 



121, 



235, 



of 



INDEX 



827 



Charles IX, King of France, 

143, 211 ff., 217 f . 
Charron, P., 633. 
Chartres, 227. 

Chateaubriand, Edict of, 204. 
Chaucer, G., 25. 
Cheshire, 323. 
Chesterton, G. K., 729. 
ChejTiey, E. P., 742 f. 
Chieregato, F., 84, 377. 
Children, 510 f ., 555. 
China, 443. 

Christian II, King of Den- 
mark, Norway, and 
Sweden, 136. 
Christian III, King of Den- 
mark, 119, 137. 
Christianitj^, 13, 583, 627, 

7441 
Christie, R. C, 731. 
Cicero, 49, 488, 619. 
Ciceronians, 577 f . 
Cisneros, 6. de, 401. 
Civita Vecchia, 535. 
Clement of Rome, 568. 
Clement V, Pope, 14. 
Clement VII, Pope, 186, 250. 

and Charles V, 236, 433. 

and Henry VIII, 287, 291 

pontificate, 379 ff., 389. 

forbids duelling, 485 f, 

and Copernicus, 622. 

and art, 690. 
Clement VIII, Pope, 228. 
Clenoch, M., 325. 
Clergy 

morals, 25, 493 f. 

power of, 27 f . 

denounced by Wyelif, 37. 

attacked in Gravamina, 45. 

assailed by Luther, 71. 

in Netherlands, 236. 

reform in England, 314. 



Clergy {continued) 

in Scotland, 353 f., 356. 

pay of, 470. 

position of, 493 ff, 

spoliation, 550 f. 
Cleves, 44. 

William, Duke of, 306. 
Clocks and watches, invention 

of, 7 f ., 688. 
Cochin, D., 738. 
Cochin (India), 442. 
Cochin-China, 408. 
Cochlaeus, 284, 588, 702. 
Coeur, J., 460. 
Cognac, League of, 186. 
Cole of Faversham, 167. 
Colet, J., 26, 53, 57, 280 f., 

510, 665, 667. 
Coligni, G. de, 199, 205, 

214 ff., 261. 
Cologne, 44, 54, 74, 252, 454. 

University of, 77, 241, 655, 
mQ, 670. 

reformation of, 120, 127, 283. 

counter-reformation of, 128. 
Colonna family, 16. 

Vittoria, 375. 
Columbus, C, 3, 10 f., 62, 430, 

434 f ., 614 f. 
Commerce, 442 ff., 523 ff. 
Communism, 94, 155. 
Como, 658. 
Compass, invention of, 7, 

614 f. 
Compostella, 499. 
Conde, Prince of, 211, 214 f . 
Condorcet, 713. 
Congo, 405. 
Constance, Council of, 

ends Great Schism, 14. 

deals with heresy, 14, 39 f. 

reforms, 14 f., 45. 

memory of, 148, 389, 703. 



828 



INDEX 



Constantinople, 9, 16, 448. 
Consubstantiation, 33, 108. 
Contarini, G., 117, 122, 377, 

382, 393, 402. 
Coornheert, D. V., 249, 251. 
Cop, 172. 
Copenhagen, University of, 

12. 
Copernicus, N. 

Bible quoted against, 573. 

economic theory, 608. 

trigonometry, 610. 

life, 618. 

astronomy, 3, 618 ff. 

De Revolutionibus Orhium 
Ccdestium, 620. 

reception of his theory, 
621 ff., 632. 

influence on philosophy, 
637 ff. 
Cordus, E., 558. 
Correggio, 680. 
Corsica, 456. 
Cortez, H., 438 f. 
Cossacks, 139 f. 
Cotta, U., 63. 

Counter-reformation, 377- 
424. 

turns back Protestants, 388. 

Spanish Spirit, 389. 

and art, 690 f . 

origin of word, 721. 
Courtenay, W., 36. 
Coutras, battle of, 223. 
Coverdale, M., 299 f., 327, 355, 

570 f. 
Cox, R., 508. 
Cracow, 140, 144. 

University of, 618. 
Craig, J., 603. 
Cranach, L., 376, 683. 
Cranmer, T., 290, 299, 313 f., 
322 f., 495. 



Creighton, M., 741. 
Crepy, Peace of, 121, 198. 
Crespin, 585. 
Cromwell, T. 

alliance with France, 187. 

and Reformation, 289, 
295 ff., 299 ff., 306 f. 

death, 307. 

fortune, 518. 

and Machiavelli, 591. 
Cuba, 438. 
Cugnatis, I. de, 502. 
Cumberland, 304. 
Cunningham, W., 729. 
Cusa, N. of, 48, 617, 640. 



Damascus, 446. 
Dancing, 500. 
Daniel, G., 704. 
Dante, 47, 423. 
Danzig, 140 f., 454. 
Damley, Lord, 366 f. 
Dauphine, 202. 
Davila, 704. 
Delft, 264. 

Demonology, 63, 653 ff. 
Demosthenes, 574. 
Denifle, 741. 
Denmark 

and Liibeck, 118. 

early emigration, 135. 

Reformation, 136 ff. 

population, 458. 

church property, 551. 
Dessau, League of, 114. 
Deventer, school, 56, 662. 
Diaz, B., 10. 
Digby, E., 639. 
Digges, L., 614. 
Dillenburg, 251, 258. 
Dilthey, W., 730. 
Diodorus, 574. 



INDEX 



829 



Dionysius the Areopagite, 50, 

52 f. 
Dispensations, papal, 22 f. 
Dolet, S., 187, 203, 231, 629 f. 
Dollinger, I., 723 f. 
Dominic, St., 397, 399. 
Dominicans, 148, 407, 702, 708. 
Donatus, Latin grammar of, 

8 f., 663. 
Dordrecht, 240. 
Doria, A., 449. 
Douai, 186, 672. 
Drake, F., 339 ff., 446. 
Dress, 496 f. 
Drinking, 485, 497 f . 
Dublin, 347. 
Dudley, Edmond, 279. 
Dudley, Guilford, 317, 518. 
Duelling, 485 f. 
Dundee, 354. 
Durand, 108. 
Diirer, A., 510. 

at Basle, 147. 

in Netherlands, 240, 454, 
466 ff., 537. 

and Mexican spoils, 439. 

property, 472. 

art, 683 ff. 

East Indies, 274 f ., 409. 
Eck, J., 68 f., 77 f., 117 f., 122, 

608. 
Eckhart, 30 f. 

Edinburgh, 3551, 360, 367, 
671. 
Treaty of, 361 f. 
Education, 661-73. 
method, 662 f., 667 f. 
curriculum, 663 f. 
effect of Reformation, 
664 f., 670. 
Edward II, King of England, 
296. 



Edward VI, King of England, 

foreign policy, 200. 

and Reformation, 286. 

birth, 299. 

reign, 310-7. 

and Scotland, 352. 

a law of, 483. 

and gilds, 540. 

and Bible, 572. 

schools, 666. 

accomplishments, 668. 
Edwards, J., 166 f. 
Egmont, L., Count of, 200, 

251, 257, 259. 
Egmont, N. of, 240. 
Egypt, 449. 
Einsiedeln, 140, 150. 
Eisenach, 63, 81. 
Eleanor, Queen of France, 

186. 
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 

and St. Bartholomew, 219. 

and Netherlands, 253, 267, 
275. 

birth, 291. 

heir to the throne, 316 f. 

character, 324. 

religious policy, 324 ff., 
336 ff. 

refuses to marry, 331. 

foreign policy, 332 ff. 

and popes, 335, 3371, 
3861 

and Ireland, 346, 348. 

and Knox, 361. 

and Mary, Queen of Scots, 
368. 

censorship, 419. 

government, 477, 479. 

navy, 491. 

dancing, 500. 

commercial policy, 527. 

and Bible, 572. 



830 



INDEX 



Elizabeth, Queen of England, 
(continued) 
and liberty, 604 f . 
skepticism, 634. 
tolerance, 650. 
accomplishments, 668. 
and universities, 671. 
and <^rt, 688. 
and Spenser, 693. 
Elizabeth of Valois, Queen of 

Spain, 226. 
Ely, H., 338. 
Elyot, T., 510, 667. 
Emden, 260. 
Emerson, R. W., 718. 
Empson, R., 279, 518. 
Emser, J., 702. 
England 

pays Peter's Pence, 21. 
church of, 41 f., 327, 330. 
literature, 135. 
and French Calvinists, 204, 

214, 219. 

and Netherlands, 238, 

248 f., 260, 275, 288, 

339. 

foreign policy under Henry 

VIII,277ff.,288,309. 

Reformation, 281 ff., 310 ff. 

Reformation Parliament, 

288 ff. 
dissolution of monasteries, 

296 f ., 551. 
alliance with Sehmalkaldic 
League, 300 f., 305 f. 
Pilgrimage of Grace, 302 ff. 
religious parties and statis- 
tics, 308, 311, 323, 
325 f., 328. 
Book of Common Prayer, 
312, 329 f., 344, 358. 
social disorders, 314 ff. 
Catholic reaction, 318 ff. 



England (contin%ed) 

war with France, 319, 332. 
conversion of masses to 

Protestantism, 327 f . 
Thirty-nine Articles, 329 f ., 

343. 
finances, 331 f ., 522. 
war with Spain, 332, 339 ff., 

433. 
rebellion of Northern Earls, 

334 f ., 550. 
buccaneers, 339 f., 533. 
. Puritanism, 343 ff. 

and Scotland, 359, 361 f. 
censorship, 419. 
population, 453, 458, 
coinage, 462, 474. 
navy, 470, 490 f . 
criminal law, 481 f. 
army, 489. 
clergy, 494. 
brigandage, 505. 
commerce, 526 f ., 532 ff. 
gilds, 540 f . 
inclosures, 543 ff. 
agriculture, 546 ff. 
serfs, 553. 

regulation of labor, 554. 
poor-relief, 561 f . 
and Polydore Vergil, 581. 
chronicles, 582. 
skeptics, 633 ff. 
witchcraft, 656, 658. 
schools, 665 f. 
universities, 671. 
Enzinas, F., 245. 
Epictetus, 574. 
Epistolae Obscurarum Viror- 

um, 55. 
Erasmus, 51. 

Enchiridion Militis Chris- 

tiani, 26, 57, 193, 

684. 



INDEX 



831 



Erasmus (contmued) 
on worship of saints, 28 f . 
and Colet, 53. 

early life and works, 56-61. 
Praise of Folly, 57. 
"philosophy of Christ," 58, 

583, 698. 
Colloqiiies, 59 f ., 667 f. 
Latin style, 60 f ., 577 f. 
foresees Reformation, 61. 
and Luther, 104 ff., 134, 

241, 649, 733. 
Diatribe on Free Will, 105, 

167. 
edits New Testament, 147, 

564 f. 
and Zwingli, 149 f., 1531, 

160. 
and Farel, 160 f . 
and Calvin, 162, 164. 
biblical criticism, 188, 
on persecution, 191, 642, 

646 f. 
influence in France, 193. 
and Netherlands, 235, 

239 ff. 
and Henry VIII, 277, 287 
and English Reformation, 

281 f. 
on polygamy, 287, 507. 
influence in Italy, 376. 
and Index, 420 ff. 
income, 471. 
on war, 488. 
on German inns, 499 f . 
anecdote, 502. 
on treatment of women, 

509. 
political theory, 557, 592 f . 
edits Fathers, 575. 
on Roman capitol, 575. 
on books, 577. 
biographies, 582. 



Erasmus (contimied) 

and witchcraft, 655. 

on education, 667, 669, 672. 

portrait, 683. 

on hymn-singing, 690. 

wit, 693. 
Erastus, T., 594. 
Erfurt, 30, 82, 350, 454. 

University of, 63 f., 670. 
Eric XIV, King of Sweden, 

138. 
Ermeland, 618. 
Esch, J., 242. 
Essex, 323. 

Earl of, 348. 
Esthonia, 139. 
Estienne family, 187, 203. 

Henry, 220. 

Henry, junior, 575. 

Robert, 565, 575 
Eton, 662 f. 

Eucharist, doctrine of the, 86, 
107 ff., 133, 160, 
165 f., 206, 241, 301, 
314, 711. 
Eucken, 740. 
Euclid, 574, 610. 
Eugene IV, Pope, 15. 
Euripides, 574. 
Exeter, 323. 

Exploration, 10 f ., 434-50. 
Exsurge Domine, 77 f . 
Eyemouth, 362. 

Faber, see Le Fevre and 

Lefevre. 
Fagius, 312, 322. 
Fallopius, 613. 
Farel, W., 160 f., 164, 168 f., 

176, 178, 195 f. 
Farnese, A., 272 ff. 
Famese, 0., 250. 
Faust, 696 f. 



ss^ 



INDEX 



Ferdinand, Emperor, 76, 238. 
and Wiirttemberg, 79, 119. 
and Luther, 86. 
opposes German reforms, 

114. 
elected King of Romans, 

118. 
tolerates Lutherans, 131. 
becomes emperor, 132, 246. 
in Hungary, 144. 
and Elizabeth, 333. 
and Council of Trent, 391, 

394 f. 
commercial grants, 528. 
Ferdinand, King of Aragon, 
76, 398, 412, 426, 
590. 
Ferrara, 375 f . 

Alphonso, Duke of, 492. 
Renee, Duchess of, 168, 376, 

646. 
University of, 618, 627. 
Fichte, 718. 
Ficino, M., 51. 
Field, J., 623. 
Figgis, N., 742. 
Finland, 138, 458. 
Fish, S., 283, 296. 
Fisher, G. P., 739. 
Fisher, H. A. L., 735. 
Fisher, J., 2821, 290, 294, 

382. 
Fisher, R., 635. 
Fitzherbert, 543. 
Flacius Ulyricus, 133, 584. 
Flanders, 239 f., 246, 257, 

274, 288, 525. 
Flemings, 270. 
Flodden, battle of, 279, 353, 

488. 
Florence, 17 f ., 372, 381, 456, 
463 f., 514, 520, 686. 
Florida, 437, 



Flushing, 260. 

Folengo, 374. 

Formula of Concord, 133 f. 

Forzio, B., 376. 

Fox, E., 301. 

Foxe, J., 327, 585 f ., 701. 

France 

Universities, 11 f. 

Raformation, 12, 187 ff. 

invades Italy, 17, 185. 

Galilean church, 42, 184 
215, 551. 

war with Germany, 79, 116 
121, 123, 127, 185 ff. 
198, 207. 

relations with Switzerland 
147. 

Calvin, 162. 

condition, 182, 184. 

royal pedigrees, 183. 

Renaissance, 187. 

expansion of, 199 f. 

wars of religion, 210 ff. 
455. 

failure of Protestantism 
228 ff. 

war with England, 279 
309, 319, 332. 

civilization, 350. 

and Scotland, 359. 

and Council of Trent, 395 

Jesuits in, 405 f . 

censorship, 419. 

population, 455, 458. 

wealth, 459 ff. 

army, 459. 

coinage, 462 f . 

finance, 467, 470, 480, 522, 

duelling, 486. 

trade, 525 f. 

serfs, 553. 

poor-relief, 561. 

memoirs, 582. 



INDEX 



833 



ranee {continued) 
republicans. 597 ff. 
skeptics, 628 ff. 
'ranche Comte, see Bur- 
gundy, Free County 
of. 
Vancis, St., 397, 399, 404. 
Vancis I, King of France, 
candidate for imperial 

throne, 77. 
and Zwingli, 157 f, 
and Calvin, 162. 
character, 184 f., 278 f . 
and Luther, 191, 231. 
alliance with German Prot- 
estants, 197. 
death, 198. 
and Waldenses, 203. 
army, 459, 489. 
finance, 461, 467, 470. 
on gambling, 485. 
College de France, 672. 
portrait, 678. 
and art, 688. 
i'rancis II, King of France, 
210 f., 330, 359, 862. 
i^rancis, Dauphin, 221. 
Franciscans, 148, 397, 407. 
i'rancke, S., 583, 627. 
i^ranconia, 91. 
i^raneker. University of, 

673. 
<^rankenhausen, 95. 
i^rankfort-on-the-Oder, Uni- 
versity of, 11, 670. 
•"rankfort-on-the-Main, 31, 
76, 321, 358, 523. 
Treaty of, 122. 
?^rauenburg, 618. 
^'rederic III, Emperor, 45. 
Frederic I, King of Denmark, 

136 f. 
^ree Will, 105, 164 ff. 



Freiburg - in - the - Breisgau, 

University of, 11. 
Freiburg in Switzerland, 

146, 168. 
Freytag, G., 718 f . 
Friesland, 235, 238, 259, 272. 
Froben, J., 147, 190, 280. 
Frobisher, M., 446. 
Froude, J. A., 343, 367, 717. 
Frundsberg, 380, 488. 
Fugger, Bank of, 77, 461, 
520 ff. 

family, 461, 479, 522 f. 

Anthony, 528. 

James, 527 f. 

Jerome, 528. 

Raymond, 528. 
Funk, 133. 
Fust, J., 9. 

Gaetano di Tiene, 397. 

Galateo, J., 375. 

Galen, 513, 574. 

Galileo, 424, 621 f. 

Gama, Vasco da, 3, 10 f ., 

441 ff. 
Gambling, 485. 
Gandia, Duke of, 517. 
Garland, John of, 663. 
Garv, N., 347. 
Gascony, 216. 
Gasquet, 740. 
Gelasius, Pope, 418. 
Gembloux, battle of, 269. 
Geneva 

evangelized by Zwingli 's 
missionaries, 158, 
160. 

Calvin at, 168 ff. 

constitution, 168 f. 

theocracy, 170 ff. 

immigration, 174 f., 204, 
321. 



834 



INDEX 



Geneva (continued) 
Libertines, 175 f . 
capital of Protestantism, 

179. 
under Beza, 181. 
Knox at, 358 f. 
dancing, 500. 

witch persecution, 656, 658. 
school, 668, 671 f. 
university, 671. 
Genoa, 381, 456, 468, 520, 525. 
Gentillet, 591. 
Germaine de Foix, Queen of 

Spain, 398. 
German Theology, The, 31. 
Germany 
universities, 11, 53, 670 f . 
mystics, 30 ff. 
nationalism, 43 ff. 
humanism, 53. 
condition, 74 ff. 
Peasants' War, 87-95, 552. 
causes, 87 ff. 
Twelve Articles, 92 f. 
suppression, 94 f . 
Luther, 97 f . 
effect of, 155, 192, 531, 
593 f. 
rebellion of the Knights, 

83 f., 505. 
religious statistics, 132 f. 
effect of religious contro- 
versy, 134. 
French Calvinists in, 204. 
and Netherlands, 237 ff. 
Ascham's opinion of, 327. 
civilization, 350. 
and Italy, 371. 
and Spain, 372. 
Counter-reformation, 388. 
and Council of Trent, 395. 
Jesuits in, 405 ff, 
censorship, 419. 



Germany (continued) 

and Reformation, 425. 

population, 454, 458. 

coinage, 463. 

inns, 499 f . 

mines, 522 f. 

trade, 526 f . 

agriculture, 543. 

serfs, 553. 

labor, 554 f. 

poor-relief, 560 f. 

constitution, 595 f. 

reform of calendar, 624. 

witch hunt, 657 f. 

schools, 665. 

books, 691. 
Gertruidenberg, 251. 
Gesner, C, 611 f. 
Ghent, 236 f ., 240, 256, 269 f., 
272 f ., 454. 

Pacification of, 265, 270. 
Ghislieri, see Pius V. 
Giberti, M., 382. 
Gibbon, E., 167, 710 f. 
Gilbert, H., 532 f. 
Gilbert, W., 615, 639. 
Gilds, 3 ff., 263 f., 537 ff. 
Giorgione, 677. 
Gipsies, 558. 

Giulio Romano, 680, 690. 
Giustiniani, 280. 
Glarus, 146, 149, 157. 
Glasgow, 354, 368. 

University of, 12. 
Glencairn, Earl of, 360. 
Gloucester, 323. 
Goa, 408, 443, 445. 
Goch, J. Pupper of, 420. 
Goethe, J. W. von, 697, 711 f. 
Gold, production of, 473 ff., 

516 f. 
Gonzalez, 588. 
Gosson, 658. 



INDEX 



835 



Gotha, 128. 
Gouge, J., 519. 
Granada, 426, 433. 
Granvelle, A. P., 250 ff. 
Gratius, 0., 55. 
Gravamina, 45 f. 
Gravelines, battle of, 200. 
Great Schism, 14. 
Greek, 16, 53, 667 ff. 

classics, 574 ff. 
Gregory VII, Pope, 43. 
Gregory XI, Pope, 36, 44. 
Gregory, XIII, Pope, 

and St. Bartholomew, 
218 f., 387. 

and Elizabeth, 337 f., 387. 

pontificate, 386 f. 

reform of Calendar, 624. 
Gregory XIV, Pope, 226. 
Greifswald, University of, 11, 

670. 
Grenoble, 195. 
Greiham, T., 534. 
Grey, Lady Jane, 316 ff., 511. 
Gribaldi, JM., 178 f. 
Grimani, 575. 
Grisar, H., 741. 
Grisons, Confederacy of, 

146 f. 
Groningen, 235, 238. 
Groote, G., 32. 
Grotius, H., 276, 704. 
Gruet, J., 176. 
Grumbach, 132. 
Guadegni, T., 520. 
Guam, 440. 

Guelders, 235, 238, 262, 272. 
Guicciardini, F., 373, 422, 

580, 704. 
Guicciardini, L., 454. 
Guinea, 533. 
Guinegate, 279. 
Guines, 200, 280 f., 319. 



Guise 

Claude, Duke of, 199. 
Francis, Duke of, 199 f., 
210 f., 214, 319, 
597. 
Henry, Duke of, 217 f., 221, 
223 f. 
Guizot, 714. 
Gustavus Vasa, King of 

Sweden, 137 f. 
Gutenberg, J., 8 f. 

Haarlem, 101, 262. 

Hagenau, 122. 

Hague, 240. 

Haiti (Espanola, Hispani- 

ola), 436, 533. 
Hales, J., 608. 
Hall, E., 284, 582, 703. 
Hallam, H., 723. 
Hamburg, 113, 454, 559. 
Hamilton, P., 354. 
Haring, C. H., 475. 
Harnack, A. von, 739. 
Harrington, 706. 
Harrison, 498, 547. 
Harzhom, E., 420. 
Haug bank, 521. 
Hawkins, 339, 533. 
Health, public, 486 f., 511 ff. 
Hebrew, 53 f., 668, 672. 
Hegel, 719 f. 
Hegius, 662. 
Heidelberg, 67. 
Heilsberg, 618. 
Heimburg, Gregory of, 46. 
Heine, H., 112, 715 f . 
Helmont, 255. 
Helmstadt, University of, 

670. 
Henlein, P., 688. 
Henry VII, King of England, 

279, 517. 



836 



INDEX 



Henry VIII, King of Eng- 
land, 
and France, 186, 279. 
character, 277 ff. 
and Luther, 277, 287 f ., 472. 
Empson and Dudley, 279. 
and Scotland, 279, 356. 
and Charles V, 280 f . 
''Defender of the Faith," 

283. 
divorce from Catharine, 
286 f., 290 f., 704, 708. 
Supreme Head of the 

Church, 289 ff., 293. 
will, 316, 321. 
and Ireland, 346, 348. 
finances, 461. 
government, 477, 479. 
navy, 491. 

commercial policy, 526. 
and Polydore Vergil, 581. 
and Sanders, 588. 
and Melanchthon, 605. 
and education, 666. 
portrait, 683. 
Henry II, King of France 
character, 198 f. 
suppresses Protestantism, 

203 f. 
death, 206 f . 

and Council of Trent, 393. 
income, 461. 
Henry III, King of France, 

143, 219 if., 600. 
Henry IV, King of France, 

597. 
policy, 167, 212, 225. 
leader of Huguenots, 223 ff. 
character, 224 f . 
conversion, 227 f , 
Edict of Nantes, 228 f. 
Henry d'Albret, King of 

Navarre, 189. 



Henry, Bang of Portugal, 

432, 446. 
Heracleides, 617. 
Herder, 718. 
Herodotus, 574. 
Hertford, 322. 
Hesse, 84, 113, 551. 
Philip, Landgrave of, 
suppresses Peasants' Re- 
volt, 95. 
calls conference at Mar- 
burg, 109. 
attacks Wiirzburg and 

Bamberg, 114. 
signs Protest, 115. 
restores Ulrich of Wiirt- 

temberg, 119. 
commits bigamy, 119. 
expels Henry of Bruns- 
wick, 120. 
captivity, 128, 130. 
and Zwingli, 157. 
Heywood, J., 283. 
Hindoos, 443. 
Hippocrates, 513. 
Historiography 

in the sixteenth century, 
579-588. 
humanistic, 579 ff. 
memoirs, 582. 
chronicles, 582. 
biography, 582 f . 
church history, 583 ff. 
later treatment of Reforma- 
tion, see Reforma- 
tion, 
Hobbes, T., 594. 
Hochstetter, C, 529. 
Hochstraten, J., 54. 
Hoen, 108, 240 f . 
Hofen, U. T. von, 160. 
Hoffberg, P. von, 538. 
Hoffmann, M., 101, 243. 



INDEX 



837 



Holbein, H., 278, 548, 677, 

683, 685. 
Holland, 76, 251. 

Anabaptists, 101. 

Reformation, 240, 250, 256, 
270. 

war with Spain, 260, 263 f ., 
271 f., 274, 342. 

population, 454. 
Hollinshed, R., 582. 
Hol>Tood, 356. 
Homer, 574. 

Hooker, R., 344 f., 604, 606. 
Hooper, 314. 

Horn, Count of, 257, 259. 
Hotman, F., 218, 220, 223, 

582, 598. 
Howard of Effingham, Lord, 

342. 
Hiibmaier, B., 92. 
Huguenots 

origin of the name, 208. 

character, 208 f. 

history, 210 ff. 

guaranteed liberty of wor- 
ship, 228 f . 

in Netherlands, 248, 260. 

and England, 332. 

polities, 596 ff. 

caricatured, 685. 

judged by French secular 
historians, 704. 

judged by Michelet, 716. 
Hulst, F. van der, 242. 
Humanism 

patronized by papacy, 16. 

prepares for Reformation, 
47, 61. 

turns against Luther, 102 ff. 

in Poland, 140. 

in Netherlands, 254 f. 

in Scotland, 354. 

decay, 692. 



Hume, D., 708 ff. 
Hungary, 144, 350, 449, 463. 

universities, 12, 
Huss, J. 

protected by a university, 
12. 

death, 14, 39. 

life and work, 38 ff. 

influence on Luther, 41, 69, 
71 f., 86, 744. 

influence in Poland, 140. 

followers in Bohemia, 144. 

on Index, 420. 
Hussites, 75, 80, 649. 
Hutlin, M., 558. 
Hutten, U. von, 684. 

mocks Julius II, 24. 

publishes Valla's Donation 
of Constantine, 49, 
55, 70. 

character and work, 55 f . 

supports rebellion of 
knights, 83. 

incites peasants, 91. 

and Luther, 96. 

taunts Erasmus, 105. 

commercial ideas, 530. 
Hutton, M., 604. 
Huxley, 730. 

Iceland, 137. 
Idria, 528. 

Imbart de la Tour, P, 736. 
Ineas, 439 f . 

Independents, 102, 345 f. 
Index of Prohibited Books, 
32, 245, 381, 383, 
388, 395, 420 ff., 591. 

Congregation of, 422. 

Index Expurgatorius, 422 f . 

effect, 423 f . 

and Copernicus, 622. 

and Weyer, 659. 



838 



INDEX 



India, 10, 441 ff., 446, 523, 

616. 
Indians (American), 436 ff. 
Individualism, 6, 28, 515, 677, 

749. 
Indulgences, 

letters of first printed, 9. 

theory and practice of, 
23 f. 

denounced by Wyclif, 37. 

denounced by Huss, 39. 

Erasmus's opinion of, 57. 

attacked by Luther, 66 f. 

in Denmark, 136. 

in Switzerland, 151. 

in Netherlands, 236. 

and Fuggers, 527. 
Inghirami, 51. 
Ingolstadt, 51. 

University of, 11, 406. 
Innocent III, Pope, 14, 

35. 
Innocent VIII, Pope, 16 f ., 

35, 654. 
Inquisition 

in Netherlands, 242 ff., 257. 

Spanish, 242, 412 ff., 431. 

in Venice, 376. 

and Loyola, 400. 

medieval, 412. 

procedure, 413. 

penalties, 414. 

number of victims, 414 f . 

scope, 415. 

in Spanish dependencies, 
416. 

Roman, 416 f. 

Index, 420, 423. 

in Portugal, 445. 

suppresses books on anat- 
omy, 613. 

and philosophy, 628. 

and Bruno, 639. 



Inquisition (continued) 

judged by modem Cath- 
olics, 642 f . 

and witchcraft, 655, 658. 

judged by Froude, 717. 
Institoris, H., 654. 
Intelligence, growth of, 12 f. 
Intelligentsia, 551 f. 
Inventions, 6 ff. 
Ireland, 346-9, 453, 535. 

Jesuits in, 405. 

and Inquisition, 417. 
Isabella, Queen of Castile, 76, 

412, 426. 
Isabella of Portgual, Queen 

of Spain, 432. 
Isocrates, 574. 
Italy 

first printers in, 9. 

lack of national feeling, 43, 
372. 

and Renaissance, 47, 372 f., 
425. 

decadence, 135. 

invaded by France, 17, 
185. 

civilization, 350. 

and Reformation, 371 ff. 

Jesuits in, 405. 

population, 455 f., 458. 

coinage, 463 f. 

hospitals, 514. 

banks, 519 f . 

trade, 525. 

reform of calendar, 624. 

universities, 673. 
Ivan IV, Czar, 143, 447, 748. 
Ivry, battle of, 225. 



Jagiello dynasty, 139. 
James IV, King* of Scotland, 
279, 352. 



INDEX 



839 



James V, King of Scotland, 
199, 210, 352 f., 
355 f., 580. 
James VI, King of Scotland, 
367, 369 f., 484, 505, 
660. 
James, W., 167, 740. 
Jane Seymour, Qneen of Eng- 
land, 299. 
Janizaries, 449, 489. 
Jansen, 276. 
Jansenists, 406. 
Janssen, J., 740. 
Japan, 405, 408, 443, 616. 
Jamae, battle of, 215. 
Java, 443, 616. 
Jena, University of, 670. 
Jerome, St., 192, 684. 
Jerome of Prague, 14, 40. 
Jerusalem, 400, 402, 499. 
Jesus Christ, 13, 29, 63. 
Jesuits, 396-411. 

in Poland, 143 f . 

in Bohemia, 144. 

in France, 202, 216, 231. 

in Netherlands, 249. 

in England, 328, 336 f. 

origins, 381, 402 f. 

and Paul IV, 384. 

at Council of Trent, 393 f. 

typical, 398. 

organization, 403 f. 

obedience, 404 f. 

growtli, 405 f. 

combat heresy, 405 ff. 

foreign missions, 407 ff. 

decay, 409 ff. 

casuistry, 411, 506. 

in Portugal, 445. 

and tyrannicide, 605. 

and philosophy, 628. 

colleges, 666, 670 f. 

art, 691. 



Jesuits (continued) 

judged by Michelet, 717. 
Jetzer, J., 148, 708. 
Jewel, J., 327, 344, 656. 
Jews, 415 ff., 426, 445, 649 
J-oan d'Albret, Queen of 

Navarre, 205, 21o. 
Joan of Arc, 581. 
Joanna, Queen of Spain, 76, 

477. 
John the Baptist, 63. 
John XXIII, Pope, 39. 
John III, King of Portugal, 

409, 445. 
John III, King of Sweden, 

138. 
Jonas, J., 420, 508. 
Josephus, 574. 
Jovius, P., 580 ff., 703. 
Jud, L., 157. 
Julius II, Pope, 18 f ., 24, 51, 

686, 709. 
Julius III, Pope, 383 f., 393, 

420. 
Justification by faith only, 
Lefevre, 53, 65. 
Luther, 65 f., 86, 570, 625, 

724, 745. 
Contarini, 122. 
At Ratisbon Colloquy, 127. 
in France, 196, 206. 
in England, 301, 314. 
in Italy, 375, 377. 
at Council of Trent, 392 f. 
historical estimate of the 
doctrine, 745 f . 

Kaiserberg, G. of, 530. 
Kant, I., 165, 625, 715 f. 
Kaulbach, 715. 
Kautsky, K., 726. 
Kawerau, G., 737. 
KeUer, L., 508. 



840 



INDEX 



Kempis, Thomas a, Imitation 
of Christ, 26, 32 f., 
401. 
Kent, 322. 
Kett, 314. 
K) air-ed-Din, 449. 
Knodt, 729. 
Knollys, 603. 
Knox, J., 167. 

at Geneva, 174, 358 f . 

in England, 313, 325, 358. 

poUtical theory, 325, 363 f., 
366, 602 ff. 

character, 357 f . 

early life, 358. 

Monstrous Regiment of 
Women, 361. 

and Mary, 364 ff. 

on women, 361, 509. 

and Buchanan, 580. 

as an historian, 586 f. 
Koberger, A., 510. 
Kohler, W., 739. 
Kohlhase, J., 505. 
Konigsberg, 526, 670. 
Koran, 420, 584. 
Kovalewsky, 729. 
Kurdistan, 449. 
Kurtz, 737. 
Kiistrin, J. von, 127, 130. 



La Boetie, 599 f. 
Lactantius, 667. 
Ladrones, 440. 
Lagarde, P. de, 736. 
Lamprecht, K., 737. 
Lancaster, John of, 36. 
Landau, 495. 
Landstuhl, 84. 
Lang, A., 367. 
Lang, M., 557. 
Languedoc, 216. 



La RocheUe, 216, 219, 229, 

260, 526. 
Las Casas, B. de, 436. 
Laski, J., 141, 312. 
Lasso, 0., 689. 
Lateran Council, Fifth, 19, 

418 f., 628. 
Latimer, H., 294, 299, 322, 

495, 504. 
Latin, 53, 63, 451, 663 ff. 

classics, 574 ff. 
La Tour, 354. 
Laurent, 739. 
Laveleye, E. de, 737. 
Laynez, 394, 401. 
Lea, H. C, 423, 731. 
Lecky, 723. 
Lefevre d 'Staples, J., 

early life, 52. 

biblical work, 52, 188, 196, 
566, 570. 

justification by faith, 53, 
65. 

and Farel, 160. 

and Calvin, 162. 

and French Reformation, 
188 ff., 196 f. 
Le Fevre, P., 400, 406. 
Leghorn, 535. 
Leicester, Robert Dudley, 

Earl of, 275, 331. 
Leinster, 348. 
Leipheim, 95. 
Leipzig 

University of, 38, 671. 

debate, 68 f., 77, 191. 

Interim, 129. 
Lemnius, S., 502 f. 
Lemonnier, 732. 
LeoX. 

character and policy, 19, 
77. 

finance, 22. 



INDEX 



841 



Leo X (continued) 

Concordat of Bologna, 43. 

and Diet of Augsburg 
(1518), 46. 

and indulgences, 66 ff. 

condemns Luther, 77. 

and Charles V, 81, 236. 

death, 84. 

attacked by Sachs, 86. 

and Henry VIII, 283. 

Oratory of Divine Love, 
397. 

and Sapienza, 673. 

portrait, 678. 

and art, 688. 
Leo, Emperor, 744. 
Leon, P. de, 437. 
Leonardo da Vinci, 

income, 472. 

scientific work, 612 f ., 637 f . 

anatomy, 613. 

physics, 613 f. 

astronomy, 617. 

on necromancy, 658. 

art, 674 ff. 
Lepanto, battle of, 266, 432, 

490. 
Lerma, Duke of, 517 f. 
Leslie, J., 354. 
Lessing, 712. 
Levant, 442. 

Lewis, King of Hungary, 144. 
Ley den, 263. 

John of, 101 f. 

University of, 275, 673. 
L'Hopital, M. de, 213, 215, 

597. 
Liege, 235, 260. 
Lilienstayn, J., 40. 
Lille, 186, 559. 
Lima, 416. 

Lincolnshire, 303, 323. 
Lisbon, 9, 408, 442, 444, 524. 



Lister, G., 240. 
Lithuania, 138 ff. 
Livonia, 139. 
Livy, 667. 
Lochleven, 368. 
Loisy, A., 739, 741. 
Lollards, 38, 354, 649. 
Lombardy, 456. 
London, 288, 317, 332. 

first printers in, 9. 

Netherlanders in, 253. 

and Reformation, 281, 301, 
322 f. 

population, 453. 

credit, 467. 

and theater, 485. 

brothels, 506. 

death-rate, 511 f. 

trade, 524, 533 f., 539, 548. 

pauperism, 559. 
Loretto, 499. 
Lorraine, 257. 

Charles, Cardinal of, 199, 
210 f. 
Lotto, L., 376. 
Lotzer, 92. 
Louis XI, King of France, 

42, 556. 
Louis XII, King of France, 

19, 182 f. 
Louvain, University of, 77, 
241, 245, 253, 378, 
420, 422, 668, 672. 
Loyola, I., 

early life, 398 f . 

conversion, 399 f . 

and Luther, 400, 405. 

first disciples, 400 f . 

Spiritual Exercises, 401 f. 

founds Company of Jesus, 
402 f. 

death, 405. 

autobiography, 588. 



842 



INDEX 



Loyola, I. (continued) 
judged by Lagarde, 736. 
# Liibeck, 113, 118 f., 454. 

Lublin, 140. 

Union of, 141. 
Lucca, 420, 456. 
Lucerne, 146, 153. 
Ludolph of Saxony, 399. 
Luther, C. von Bora, 123, 288. 
Luther, M. 
career 

changes in his life-time, 3, 
alludes to New World, 

11, 497. 
and University of Wit- 
tenberg, 12. 
influenced by mystics, 

32 ff. 
nationalism, 44, 46 f . 
early life, 62 ff. 
becomes a friar, 64. 
inner development, 64 ff. 
journey to Italy, 64, 514. 
summoned to Augsburg 

(1518), 67 f. 
debates with Eck, 68 f. 
condemned by Catholic 

church, 77. 
bums bull and Canon 

Law, 78. 
at Diet of Worms, 79 f ., 

132, 398, 441, 741. 
under ban of the Empire, 

81. 
at Wartburg, 81. 
opposes radicals, 82 ff., 

96 ff. 
and Peasants' War, 91, 

93, 97 f., 557 f. 
wins German ruling 

classes, 111. 
reforms church service 
and government, 112 f. 



Luther, M, (continued) 
illnesses, 123. 
marriage, 123 f., 284. 
death, 124, 322 note. 
real estate and income, 

468, 471. 
anecdotes, 495 f., 580. 
closes brothels, 506 f . 
doctrines, opinions and 

character 
doctrine of eucharist, 36 

(see controversy with 

Zwingli). 
justification by faith 

only, 65. 
declares councils can err, 

69. 
literary genius, 111, 125. 
political theory, 116, 549, 

594 ff., 606. 
opinion of polygamy, 

120, 286, 507, 

703. 
virulence, 123. 
character, 124 f. 
opinion of theater, 485. 
on Sunday observance, 

171. 
on Aristotle, 637. 
opinion of war, 487. 
on hunting, 500. 
on Reformation, 504, 

700 f. 
on lying, 506. 
on marriage, 506, 508 f. 
on education, 511, 665, 

667. 
commercial ideas, 530 f ., 

608. 
on poor relief, 560. 
biblical criticism, 568 f., 

572. 
refutes Koran, 584. 



INDEX 



843 



Luther, M. (continued) 

on Copemican theory, 

621. 
philosophy, 624 ff. 
on toleration, 642 ff. 
on witchcraft, 652, 655 f. 
on art and music, 687, 

690. 
writings 

translates Valla on Dona- 
tion of Constantine, 

49. 
lectures on Bible, 64. 
Ninety -five Theses, 67, 

281. 
Address to the Christian 

Nohility, 70 ff., 376, 

530, 560. 
Babylonian Captivity of 

Church, 72 f., 'l20, 

164, 282. 
translation of Bible, 73 f ., 

81, 111 f., 569 f. 
On Monastic Vows, 81. 
Bondage of the Will, 

105 f., 164. 
hymns, 112, 354, 689, 

737. 
catechisms, 112, 164, 

407. 
Jack Sausage, 120. 
Schmalkaldic Articles, 

121. 
Against the Papacy at 

Rome, 123. 
TaUe Talk, 124. 
influence and relations with 

contemporaries 
Lefevre, 53. 
Hutten, 56. 
general influence, 62, 

80 f., 83, 698. 
Sachs, 86 f . 



Luther, M. {continued) 

deserted by humanists, 

102 ff. 
and Erasmus, 104 ff., 241, 

649. 
and Zwingli, 107 ff., 

150 ff., 154, 159 f. 
and Melanchthon, 133. 
invited to Denmark, 136. 
hailed by Bohemian 

Brethren, 144. 
and Calvin, 162, 165, 

179 f. 
More, 167. 
influence in France, 

188 ff., 203. 
influence in Netherlands, 

239 ff. 
and Henry VIII, 277, 

282 f ., 285, 287. 
influence in England, 

281 ff., 299 f., 312, 

326, 635. 
influence in Scotland, 

354 ff. 
influence in Italy, 373 ff., 

380. 
influence on Catholic re- 
form, 388. 
Index, 420. 
Loyola, 400, 405. 
Lemnius, 503. 
and Raphael, 678 f. 
and Diirer, 684. 
caricatured, 685. 
and Faust, 697. 
judged by posterity, 
Sleidan, 587, 705. 
earily biographers, 588. 
Des Periers, 629, 
Montaigne, 631 f. 
Charron, 633. 
Bruno, 639. 



844 



INDEX 



Luther, M. (continued) 
R. Burton, 700. 
early Catholics, 702. 
Bossuet, 703. 
Vettori, 704. 
Guicciardini, 704. 
Brantome, 704. 
Robertson, 709. 
Hume, 710. 
Gibbon, 710 f. 
Wieland, 711. 
Goethe, 712. 
Lessing, 712. 
Condorcet, 713. 
and French Revolution, 

713 ff. 
and Romantic Movement, 

715 fie. 

Mme. de Stael, 715. 
Heine, 715 f. 
Michelet, 716 f. 
Carlyle, 718. 
Emerson, 718. 
Herder, 718. 
Arndt, 718. 

German patriots, 718 f. 
Hegel, 720. 
Dollinger, 723 f. 
Bax, 725 f. 
Nietzsche, 730 f. 
Troeltsch, 733. 
Santayana, 734. 
Imbart de la Tour, 736. 
Lagarde, 736. 
The Great War, 737 f . 
Paquier, 738. 
Harnack, 739. 
Loisy, 739. 
W. James, 740. 
Grisar, 741. 
Acton, 741. 

secularization of the 
world, 748. 



Lutheranism, 

in England, 38, 308, 330. 

in Germany, 111, 133 f. 

in France, 195 ff. 

in Netherlands, 243 ff. 

in Italy, 376 f., 417. 

and papacy, 383. 

in Spain, 415 f. 

political theory, 594, 707. 
Luxemburg, 76, 238. 
Lyly, J., 635. 
Lyndsay, D., 351, 355 note, 

356, 615. 
Lyons, 512, 523, 526, 556. 

Waldenses, 35. 

and Reformation, 192, 
195, 218. 

Maastricht, 258, 273. 
MacAlpine, J., 354. 
Macaulay, 432, 717. 
McGiffert, A. C., 739. 
Machiavelli, N. 

The Prince, 295, 589. 

and Index, 421 f. 

on war, 487 ff. 

ethics, 505 f . 

on classics, 576. 

as an historian, 580. 

political theory, 589 ft'., 
599, 601 f., 608. 

and Christianity, 628, 649. 
Mackinnon, 742. 
Madagascar, 443. 
Madeira, 441, 444. 
Madrid, 9. 

Treaty of, 185 f ., 379. 
Madgeburg, 63, 66, 129. 
Magdeburg Centuries, 584 f. 
Magellan, F., 3, 440 f., 615. 
Magni, 0., 138. 
Magrath, 417. 
Maitland, 365. 



INDEX 



845 



Majorca, 415. 

Malabar, 524. 

Malacca, 443. 

Malay Peninsula, 446, 616. 

Maldonato, 106. 

Malines, 252 t, 262. 

Malory, T. 
La Morte d' Arthur, 692. 

Malta, 456. 

Manchester, 538. 

Manners, 500 ff. 

Manresa, 399, 401. 

Manichaeans, 418. 

Mansfeld, 62, 523, 662. 

Mantua, 121. 
Benedict of, 376. 
Isabella d'Este, Marchion- 
ess of, 376, 572. 

Manz, F., 645. 

Marburg, 

Colloquy at, 109 f. 
University of, 287, 354, 670. 

Marcellus II, Pope, 384. 

Marcion, 583, 744. 

Marcourt, A. de, 197. 

Marcus Aurelius, 574. 

Margaret d 'Angouleme, 
Queen of Navarre, 
29, 324, 572, 676. 
and Reformation, 189 f., 
194 f. 

Jlargaret Tudor, Queen of 
Scotland, 330,352. 

Mariana, 605. 

Marignano, battle of, 147, 
150, 185, 488. 

Marlowe, C, 635, 697. 

Marnix, P. van, 263. 

Marot, C, 187, 194, 197, 203, 
232, 693. 

Marranos, 240, 445. 

Marriage, 
prohibited degrees, 22 f. 



Marriage (continued) 

Protestant regulation of, 

112, 173. 
Catholic reform, 395. 
esteemed, 507 f . 
Marsiglio of Padua, 43. 
Mary, Mother of Jesus, wor- 
shiped, 29, 63, 148, 

358, 495. 

Mary of Burgundy, Empress, 

76, 235. 
Mary Tudor, Queen of 
England, 287, 
291. 
foreign policy, 200, 319. 
and Netherlands, 248 f. 
succession, 316 f. 
marriage, 318 f., 432. 
religious policy, 319 ff. 
and Knox, 358, 361. 
censorship, 419. 
commercial policy, 526. 
and universities, 671. 
Mary Tudor, Queen of 
France, 281, 316, 
432. 
Mary of Hapsburg, Queen of 
Hungary, 237, 244, 
249. 
Mary of Lorraine, Queen of 
Scotland, 199, 352, 

359, 361. 

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 
and England, 325, 330, 

333 f., 336, 338, 340, 

352, 365, 368. 
execution, 339 f., 368 f. 
marriage with Francis II, 

210, 351, 359. 
birth, 356. 
and Knox, 364 tf . 
marriage with Damley, 

366. 



846 



INDEX 



Mary Stuart (continued) 

marriage with Bothwell, 
367 f. 

Casket Letters, 367 f . 

deposed, 367, 602 f. 

dress, 466, 

and Buchanan, 580. 
Martyr, Peter, see Vermigli 

and Anghierra. 
Marx, C, 724 f. 
Masuccio, 50. 
Mathesius, 588. 
Mathews, S., 725. 
Matthews, T., 300. 
Matthys, J., 101 f. 
Maurenbrecher, 740. 
Maurer, H., 91. 
Maurolycus, 611. 
Maximilian I, Emperor, 

and Julius II, 19. 

and Luther, 68. 

policy, 75 f . 

death, 77. 

and Netherlands, 235, 238, 
486. 
Maximilian II, Emperor, 132, 

144, 258. 
Mayence, 8 f ., 74, 666, 670. 

Albert, Elector of, 66, 79, 
496. 

Berthold, Elector of, 418. 
Mayenne, Duke of, 225 ff., 

492. 
Mayr, C, 528. 
Meaux, 192, 195, 202, 218. 
Mecca, 446. 

Medici, de', family, 15, 17, 
519. 

Lorenzo the Magnificent, 
19, 682. 

Lorenzo II, 198 f. 

Alexander, 250, 381. 

Cosimo, 372. 



Medina, 446, 513 fif. 
Medina Sidonia, Duke of, 341. 
Mediterranean, 442, 523. 
Melanchthon, P. 

doctrine of eucharist, 70. 

and Luther, 81, 111, 124, 
133. 

and Peasants' "War, 98, 558. 

at Marburg Colloquy, 109. 

drafts Augsburg Confes- 
sion, 117. 

on polygamy, 120, 287, 

reforms Cologne, 121. 

negotiates with Catholics, 
122. 

attacked by Lutherans, 
129, 133. 

and Zwingli, 134. 

and Calvin, 164. 

and Servetus, 178. 

and France, 187, 203. 

and England, 299, 301, 312, 
326 f. 

and Scotland, 356. 

on Index, 420. 

salary, 471. 

and Lemnius, 503. 

and Bible, 569. 

political theory, 596, 605. 

and Copernicus, 621 f. 

persecutes, 644 f . 

on education, 667, 
Mendelssohn, 715. 
Mercator, G., 616. 
Merindol, 203. 
Metz, 184, 200. 
Mexico, 416, 438 f ., 474 f. 
Meyerbeer, 715. 
Mezeray, de, 704. 
Michaelangelo, 472, 681 ff., 

686, 690. 
Miehelet, J., 398, 716 f. 
Middleburg, 263. 



INDEX 



847 



]\Iilan, 185 f., 372, 380 f., 

416 f., 456. 
Milne, W., 359. 
:\Iiltitz, C. von, 68. 
Milton, J., 74, 423, 608, 

668. 
Mirabilia Urhis Romae, 74. 
Mirandola, Pico della, 51 ff., 

108, 374, 606. 
Miritzsch, M., 240. 
Mississippi, 437. 
Modena, 456. 
jMohacs, battle of, 144. 
Mohammedanism, 433, 448, 
583 f ., 627, 707 f ., 
745. 
Moluccas, 408, 443. 
Monarchy, 476 f., 549. 
Moncontour, battle of, 215. 
Money 

value of, in the sixteenth 
century, 461 ff., 
472 f. 

coins, 462 ff. 

interest, 467 f. 

power of, 548. 
Monod, G., 735. 
Monopolies, 85, 88, 528 ff. 
Mons, battle of, 216, 261. 
Montaigne, M. de, 

and New World, 11. 

and Reformation, 231 f. 

on torture, 482. 

on classics, 576 f. 

and La Boetie, 599 f. 

skepticism, 631 f. 

on toleration, 648. 

on witchcraft, 660 f . 
Montauban, 219, 229. 
Montbeliard, 161. 
Monte, A. C. del, 382. 
Montesquieu, 707. 
Montluc, B. de, 216, 582. 



Montmorency, A. de, 185, 187, 

517. 
Montpellier, 229. 
Mook, battle of, 263. 
Moors, 426, 428, 433 f. 
Morals, 503 ff. 

of clergy, 25, 493 f . 
IVIorata, 0., 374. 
Moravians, see Bohemian 

Brethren. 
Moray, Earl of, 334, 367 f. 
More, T. 

Utopia, 11, 26, 509, 558, 
606 f., 648, 698. 

debt to Lefevre, 53. 

and Reformation, 167, 
281 ff., 295, 299. 

on Henry VIII, 279, 295. 

death, 294 f. 

on persecution, 294 f ., 648. 

drinks only water, 497. 

on hunting, 500. 

marriages, 508 f . 

and Bibles, 571. 

and religion, 633 f., 649. 

and witchcraft, 655. 

portrait, 683. 

judged by Robertson, 731 
Moriscos, 415, 433 t, 517, 
Morley, Lord, 592. 
Mornay, P. Duplessis, 264, 

598 f. 
Morocco, 446. 
Morone, 394. 

Mortmain, Statute of, 41. 
Morton, Earl of, 360. 
Moschus, 574. 
Moscow, 512. 
Mosheim, 712. 
Motley, 718. 
Mount joy. Lord, 277. 
Miihlberg, battle of, 128, 238. 
Miihlhausen in Thuringia, 94. 



848 



INDEX 



Miilhausen in Alsace, 160. 
Munich, 666. 
Miinster, 101 f., 244. 
Munster, S., 420, 565. 
Miinster, T., 82, 91, 94 f., 97, 

112, 594, 701. 
Muret, 576. 
Murner, T., 472, 694. 
Muscovy, 139, 143 f., 447. 
Music, 689. 
Mutian, 54, 103. 
Myconius, 160, 313. 
Mystics, 29-34, 744. 



Naarden, 262. 
Namur, 267. 
Nanak, 745. 
Nantes 

University of, 11. 

Edict of, 228 f ., 406, 650. 
Naples 

French in, 42, 186. 

Spanish, 372, 380, 416 f . 

Reformation, 375 f . 

population, 456. 
Narva, 534. 
Nash, T., 635. 
Nassau, 251. 

Louis of, 257 ff., 263. 
Nationalism 

rise of, 5. 

effect on church, 41-47. 

in France, 182. 
Naumburg, Bishop of, 120. 
Negroes, 437, 525, 533. 
Neo-Platonism, 51, 54. 
Nesbit, J., 354. 
Netherlands 

mystics, 32 f . 

Charles V, 78. 

and French Calvinists, 204, 
216. 



Netherlands (continued) 

constitution, 234 ff. 

Mary, Regent of, 237, 244, 
249. 

Margaret of Austria, Re- 
gent of, 237. 

relations with the Empire, i 
237 f. i 

Reformation, 239 ff., 271 ff. i 

and Spain, 246 ff., 254 ff., ; 
488. 

and Alva, 258 ff. 

Northern Provinces declare 
independence, 272 ff., 
602. 

"Beggars," 256 ff., 342. 

and England, 332, 344 f. 

civilization, 350. 

Jesuits, 405 f . 

censorship, 419. 

population, 453, 458. 

post office, 486. 

commerce, 531 ff. 

agriculture, 547. 

serfs, 553. 

poor-relief, 559 f. 

reform of calendar, 624. 
Newcastle, 358. 
Nice, Truce of, 121, 198. 
Nicholas V, Pope, 16, 45, 

566. 
Nicoletto, 374. 
Nietzsche, F., 730 f. 
Niklashausen, Piper of, 87. 
Nimes, 219. 

Bishop of, 205. 
Nobility, 236, 491 f., 550. 
Nola, 639. 
Norfolk, 323. 

Duke of, 334 f . 
Norman, R., 615. 
Normandy, 202. 
North, T., 576. 



INDEX 



849 



Northumberland, John Dud- 
ley, Duke of, 316 f., 
321. 
Norway, 135, 137, 458. 
Norwich, 254, 315. 
Novara, battle of, 150. 
Noyen, 161. 

Nuremberg, 74, 79, 86, 90, 
128, 454, 483, 688. 
humanism, 54. 
Diet of (1522), 84 f., 528. 
Diet of (1524), 851 
' ' godless painters, ' ' 103, 

628. 
revolts from Rome, 113. 
Peace of, 118. 
Diirer, 472, 684. 
poor-relief, 560. 

Occam, William of, 35 f ., 43, 
108, 625, 743. 

Ochino, B., 174, 312, 375, 397, 
420. 

Oecolampadius, J., 108 ff., 
156 f ., 159, 161, 299, 
312, 420, 508, 626. 

Oldenbarneveldt, J. van, 275, 
602. 

Olivetan, 162, 196, 570. 

Orange, Anne, Princess of, 
251, 253. 

Orange, Charlotte, Princess 
of, 251. 

Orange, William, Prince of, 
167, 246, 250 ff., 258. 
character, 251, 274. 
elected Statholder of Hol- 
land, 261. 
death, 274, 340. 
and England, 339. 

Orellana, 438. 

Orinoco, 436. 

Orleans, University of, 162. 



Orleans (continued) 

Reformation, 197, 202, 218. 

States General, 212 f. 
Osgood, H. L., 743. 
Osiander, A., 420, 620, 623. 
Oudewater, 264. 
Overj^ssel, 235. 

Oxford, University of, 36, 38, 
281, 471, 639, 671, 
687. 
Oxfordshire, 314. 

Pacific Ocean, 438, 440. 
Paciolus, L., 610. 
Pack, O. von, 114. 
Paderborn, University of, 670. 
Padua, University of, 618, 627. 
Paget, Lord, 310. 
Palatinate, 74, 79, 84, 121, 
127. 

Frederic III, Elector Pala- 
tine, 121, 128. 
Palermo, 416. 
Palestrina, 384, 689. 
Palma, University of, 12. 
Pampeluna, 399 f. 
Papacy 

history of in the later Mid- 
dle Ages, 13-20. 

triumphs over Councils, 15. 

secularization, 15. 

patronizes art and letters, 
16. 

denounced by Wyclif , 37, 

rejected by Bohemian 
Brethren, 40. 

attacked by Marsiglio, 43. 

assailed by Valla, 49. 

rejected by Luther, 68 ff., 
123, 388. 

dependent on Spain, 372. 

history, 1522-90, 377-88. 

and Turks, 449. 



850 



INDEX 



Papacy (continued) 
finance, 480. 

judged by Creighton and 
Acton, 642, 741. 
Paquier, 738. 

Paracelsus, T., 513, 632, 638 f. 
Paraguay, 408. 
Pare, A., 513 f. 
Paris 

first printers at, 9. 
university of, 11, 42, 161, 
190 f., 202 ff., 227, 
250, 400, 422, 561, 
566, 600, 642, 664. 
College of Montaigu, 161, 
400 f ., 669. 
Parlement of, 42, 1841, 

191, 227, 229, 406. 
and Reformation, 192, 
195 ff., 213, 217, 221, 
228. 
Jesuits, 202. 
besieged by Henry IV, 

225 f., 455. 
population, 455. 
credit, 467. 
constabulary, 482. 
brothels, 507. 
hospitals, 514. 
trade, 539. 
Parker, 604. 

Parma, Duke of, 226, 456. 
Parma, Margaret of, 250, 

256 f. 
Pascal, B., 398. 
Passau, Convention of, 130. 
Pastor, A., 626. 
Pastor, L. von, 740 f . 
Patten, S. N., 726. 
Paul the Apostle, 13, 52 f., 65, 
98, 150, 356, 377, 
418, 742. 
Paul II, Pope, 16. 



Paul III, 250. 

and oecumenical council, 
121, 389 f. 

and Luther, 123. 

alliance with Charles V, 
127. 

and Margaret of Navarre, 
189. 

and Rabelais, 194. 

and England, 292 ff. 

pontificate, 381 ff. 

reforms, 381 ff. 

foreign policy, 383. 

and Jesuits, 401. 

and Inquisition, 416. 

and American Indians, 436. 

and Sapienza, 471, 673. 

and artists, 472, 504. 

and Copernicus, 620, 622. 

and philosophy, 628. 
Paul IV, 382, 384, 397, 417, 

421 f. 
Paulet, Sir A., 339. 
Paulus Diaeonus, 608. 
Pauperism, 558 ff. 
Pausanias, 574. 
Pavia, battle of, 94, 185, 372, 

379, 459. 
Penz, G., 103, 628. 
Periers, Des, 629. 
Perrin, A., 176. 
Persia, 449. 
Perth, 360. 

Peru, 416, 438 ff., 474 f. 
Pescia, Domenico da, 18. 
Petrarch, 47. 
Petri, L., 138. 
Petri, O., 137. 
Pfefferkom, J., 54. 
Philibert, E., 249. 
Philip IV of France, 14, 42. 
Philip the Handsome of Haps- 
burg, 76, 235. 



INDEX 



851 



Philip II, King of Spain, 130, 
132. 
and France, 212, 226 ff., 

252. 
on St. Bartholomew, 218. 
and Netherlands, 246 ff., 

272 ff., 602. 
marriage with Mary of 

England, 318 f. 
and Elizabethan England, 
331 ff., 338, 362, 
533. 
and papacy, 384 ff. 
and Council of Trent, 395. 
finances, 431. 

character and policy, 431 ff. 
and Portugal, 446. 
and Turks, 449 f . 
portrait, 678. 
Philippine Islands, 440 f. 
Philosophy, 624-40. 
Keformers, 624 ff. 
skeptics, 627 ff. 
science, 637 ff. 
Piacenza, 250, 456 
Picardy, 161, 202. 
Piccolomini family, 15. 
Piedmont, 35. 
Pindar, 574. 
Pinkie, battle of, 359. 
Pirckheimer, W., 104, 106, 

683. 
Pisa, 627. 

Council of (1409), 14. 
Schismatic Council of 
(1511), 19. 
Pistoia, 488. 
Pius II, Pope, 16, 241, 42, 

350. 
Pius IV, Pope, 384 ff., 393 ff. 
Pius V, Pope, 334 f., 338, 

386 f., 417, 422. 
Pizarro, 439 f. 



Plato, 51, 150, 418, 574, 606, 

629. 
Pliny the Elder, 667. 
Plutarch, 574, 576, 619. 
Pocock, R., 48. 
Podiebrad, 40. 
Poggio, 51, 421. 
Poissy, Colloquy of, 2131, 

598. 
Poitiers, Diana of, 199. 
Poitou, 216. 
Poland, 

pays Peter's Pence, 21. 

suzerain of Prussia, 113. 

literature, 135. 

constitution, 138 f. 

wars, 139 f., 447. 

Reformation, 140-44. 

Henry III, 143, 219. 

civilization, 350. 

Counter-reformation, 388. 

and Council of Trent, 395. 

Jesuits, 405. 

population, 458, 

gilds, 540. 

reform of calendar, 624. 
Pole, R., 318 ff., 377, 382, 396, 

591, 604. 
Political theory, 588-609. 

the state as power, 589 ff. 

republicanism, 592 ff. 

church and state, 593 ff. 

constitution, 595 ff. 

tyrannicide, 606. 

radicals, 606 1 

economic, 607 ff. 
Pollard, A. F., 742. 
Polybius, 574. 

Polygamy, 102, 120, 507, 574. 
Pomponazzi, P., 105, 627, 649. 
Ponet, J., 604 1 
Pontano, 508. 
Pontoise, Estates of, 598. 



852 



INDEX 



Porta, J. B., della, 614. 
Portsmouth, 322. 
Portugal 

exploration, 10, 435. 

literature, 135. 

civilization, 350. 

and Council of Trent, 395. 

Jesuits, 405. 

colonies, 407 ff., 435, 441 ff. 

Inquisition, 416, 445, 

annexed to Spain, 432, 446. 

decadence, 444 ff. 

population, 458. 

navy, 490. 

commerce, 524. 

reform of calendar, 624. 
Porzio, S., 627. 
Posen, 140, 144. 
Post Office, 468 f., 486. 
Praemunire, Statute of, 41 f., 

289. 
Prague, University of, 38, 639, 
Predestination, doctrine of, 
164ff., 176, 249, 682. 
Prescott, 718. 

Pressburg, University of, 12. 
Prices, 88, 315, 464 ff. 

wheat, 464 f. 

animals, 465. 

groceries, 466. 

dry goods, 466 f . 

metals, 467. 

real estate, 468. 

books, 468. 

rise of, 473, 516 f., 608. 
Priscillian, 564. 
Printing, 3, 8ff., 239, 3491, 

418 f. 
Probst, J., 240, 242. 
Proletariat, 552 ff. 
Prostitution, 506 f . 
Protestantism 

origin of the name, 115. 



Protestantism (continued) 
period of expansion, 132, 

388 f , 
varieties of, 179 f. 
in France, 229 ff. 
judged by Renan, 742, 
Provisors, Statute of, 41, 289. 
Prudentius, 667. 
Prussia, 113, 133, 139, 141, 

350, 
Ptolemy, 574, 616 note, 617, 
Puglia, Francis da, 18. 
Pulci, 628, 

Puritans, 167, 286, 328, 339, 
343 ff., 358, 483, 486, 
604, 690. 

Quakers, 102, 
Quinet, E., 718. 
Quirini, 595. 

Rabelais, P., 187. 

and Reformation, 194 f ,, 
197, 231 f. 

given a benefice, 471. 

anarchism, 606. 

philosophy, 629. 

love of life, 694. 
Racau, 142. 

Racovian catechism, 142. 
Radewyn, 32. 
Raleigh, W,, 532. 
Ramus, P., 637. 
Ranke, L. von, 343, 367, 379, 

721 f. 
Raphael Sanzi, 472, 492, 

677 ff., 686. 
Ratisbon 

League of, 114. 

Diet of, 122. 

Book of, 122. 

Colloquy of, 127, 169. 
Records, R., 616 



INDEX 



853 



Reinach, S., 735. 

Reformation 
antecedents, 4 ff. 
causes, 20-29, 743 f. 
and Renaissance, 47, 187 f., 
231 ff., 730, 732 f., 
749 f. 
and morals, 503 f . 
and capitalism, 515. 
historiography in 16th cen- 
tury, 585 ft', 
and state, 593 ff. 
and education, 664 ff. 
and art, 684 f., 689 f. 
and books, 691. 
parallels to, 744 f . 
religious changes, 745 ff. 
political and economic 

changes, 747 f. 
intellectual changes, 749 f . 
the word, 700. 
various interpretations, 
699-750. 
Protestant, 699 ff., 739 f . 
Catholic, 701 ff., 740 f. 
political, 703 ff. 
economic, 106, 708, 724 ff. 
rationalist, 706 ff . 
French Revolutionary, 

713 ff. 
romantic, 715 ff. 
liberal, 716 ff., 742. 
scientific, 719 ff. 
Darwinian, 729 ff. 
Teutonic, 736 1, 747. 
Eeformatian of the Emperor 

Frederic III, 90. 
Beformation of the Emperor 

Sigismund, 89 f . 
Reinhold, E., 621, 623. 
Rembrandt, 276. 
Renaissance, 4. 

and Reformation, 47, 187 f ., 



Renaissance (cantiniied) 

231 ff., 730, 732 f., 
743, 749 f. 

in France, 187. 

in Netherlands, 239. 
Renan, 742. 
Renard, 320 f. 
Renaudie, 210 f. 
Reni, G., 689. 
Requesens, L., 263. 
Reuchlin, J., 54 f ., 103. 
Reval, 534. 
Rheims, 252, 672. 
Rheticus, G. J., 610, 620 ff. 
Rhodes, 449. 
Ribadeneira, 588. 
Riccio, D., 366. 
Richmond, Duke of, 287, 471. 
Ridley, 299, 322. 
Riga, 144, 534. 
Rink, M., 100. 
Ritschl, 723. 
Robertson, J. M., 731. 
Robertson, W., 367, 709. 
Robespierre, 716. 
Robinson, J. H., 743. 
Rode, H., 240. 
Rodrigo, 416. 
Rogers, J., 322. 
Rohrbach, J., 94, 98. 
Rome 

and Luther, 64, 67. 

sack of, 185, 372, 380, 456. 

population, 456. 

university of, 471, 673. 

administration, 481, 504. 

pilgrimages, 499. 

prostitutes, 507. 

and Copernicus, 618. 

St. Peter's Church, 686. 

Pasquino and Marf orio, 693. 
Ronnow, 137. 
Ronsard, P. de, 231 f ., 693. 



854 



INDEX 



Rosenblatt, W., 508. 
Rostock, University of, 670. 
Roth, C, 529. 
Rotterdam, 235, 260. 
Rouen, 197, 214. 
Rousillon, 426. 
Rovere family, 15, 18. 
Rubeanus, C, 55, 103 f. 
Rudolph II, Emperor, 268. 
Russell, B., 735. 
Russia, 446 f ., 534, 551. 
Ruthenians, 138. 
Riixner, G., 90. 
Ruysbroeck, John of, 32, 34. 

Saal, M. von der, 120. 
Sabatier, P., 737 f., 742. 
Sachs, H., 86 f ., 696. 
Sacraments 

Catholic doctrine of, 27, 

745. 
Protestant doctrine of, 

72 ff. 301, 314, 625, 

745 f. 
Saero Bosco, J. de, 615. 
Sadoleto, 169, 566. 
St. Andrews, 355, 358, 360. 
St. Bartholomew, massacre of, 

217 f ., 261 f., 387, 

597. 
St. David's, 323. 
St. Gall, 101, 157, 160, 645. 
St. Quentin, battle of, 200. 
Saints, worship of, 28 f., 57, 

206, 747. 
Salamanca, University of, 

400, 673. 
Salerno, University of, 11. 
Salisbury, 323. 
Salmeron, 393, 401. 
Samosata, Paul of, 627. 
Sanchez, F., 639. 
Samson, B., 151. 



Sanders, N., 325, 588, 702. 

Sandomir, 142. 

San Gallo, 686. 

Santayana, G., 734 f. 

Saracens, 448. 

Saragossa, University of, 12. 

Sardinia, 456. 

Sarpi, P., 377, 390, 395, 423, 

705 f. 
Satyre Menippee, 226 f . 
Savonarola, 16 ff., 51, 580, 

649. 
Savoy, 35, 168, 372, 395, 
455 f., 658. 
Charles III, Duke of, 168. 
Louise of, 185. 
Saxony 

division into Albertine and 
Ernestine, 119 note. 
Albertine 

George, Duke of, 24, 56, 
119, 191, 283, 528, 
554 f., 700. 
Henry, Duke of, 119. 
Maurice, Duke and Elec- 
tor of, 119. 
alliance with Charles 

V, 127 f. 
attacks John Frederic, 

128. 
becomes elector, 128. 
captures Magdeburg, 

129. 
turns against Charles 

V, 130, 393. 
death, 130. 

and Council of Trent, 
393. 
Ernestine 

nationalism, 44. 
indulgences, 66. 
mentioned, 74. 
Peasants' War, 91 ff. 



INDEX 



855 



Saxony {continued) 

Anabaptists, 103, 644. 
becomes Lutheran, 113. 
brigandage, 505. 
church property, 551. 
Frederic, Elector of, 77, 
82, 93. 
supports Luther, 66, 
79, 81, 104, 113, 283. 
John, Elector of, 113, 
283, 595, 644. 
signs Protest, 115. 
votes against Ferdi- 
nand, 118. 
John Frederic the Elder, 
Elector and Duke of, 
305. 
expels Bishop of 

Naumburg, 120. 
defeated and captured 

by Charles V, 128. 
freed, 130. 

loses electoral vote, 
128. 
John Frederic the Young- 
er, Duke of, 132. 
Scaliger, J. J., 575, 585. 
Scandinavia, 21, 135 ff., 350. 
Schaffhausen, 146, 157, 160. 
Schartlin, 128. 
Scheldt barred by Holland, 

274. 
Schenck, M., 134. 
Schenitz, J., 518. 
Schleswig-Holstein, 136. 
Schmalkalden, League of, 
118 ff., 187, 197, 
300 f., 305 f. 
Schmalkaldic War, 126 ff., 
198, 200, 376, 383, 
393. 
Schmidt, 712. 
Schonberg, 622. 



Schools, 12, 471, 662 ff. 
Schoonhoven, 264. 
Schwenckfeld, C. von, 

164. 
Schwyz, 146, 153. 
Science, 609-24. 

inductive method, 609. 

mathematics, 609 ff. 

zoology, 611 f. 

anatomy, 612 f . 

physics, 613 ff. 

geography, 615 f . 

astronomy, 616 ff. 

schools, 666. 
Scotland 

and England, 279, 309, 
351 f ., 358 f., 369. 

condition, 350 ff. 

and France, 351 f., 358 f. 

Reformation, 352 ff., 359 ff., 
369 f. 

the kirk, 364, 369 f. 

Black Acts, 369. 

population, 453 f., 458. 

theater, 485. 

duelling, 486. 

brigandage, 505. 

serfdom, 553, 
Scott, R., 659 f. 
Scotus, Duns, 34. 
Sea power, 490 f. 
Sebastian, King of Portugal, 

446. 
Seckendorf, 701. 
Selim I, Sultan, 449, 748. 
Sell, K., 737. 
Semblangay, 518. 
Seneca, 162. 

Serfdom, 89 f., 97 f., 552 f. 
Seripando, 417. 
Servetus, M., 177 f., 613, 

626 f ., 645. 
Severn, 322. 



856 



INDEX 



Seville, 341, 416, 457, 524 f . 
University of, 12. 

Seymour, T., 315. 

Shakespeare, W., 424, 581, 
693, 698. 

Sicily, 416, 455. 

Sickingen, F. von, 56, 83 f ., 
505, 550, 684. 

Sidney, H., 348. 

Sidney, P., 336, 501. 

Siena, 375, 381. 

Sievershausen, battle of, 130. 

Sigismund, Emperor, 39. 

Sigismund I, King of Poland, 
139 ff. 

Sigismund II, King of Po- 
land, 141 ff. 

Sigismund III, King of Po- 
land, 144. 

Sigiienza, University of, 12. 

Sikhism, 745. 

Silver, production of, 473 ff., 
516 f. 

Simmel, F., 726. 

Simons, M., 244. 

Sixtus IV, Pope, 16, 412. 

Sixtus V, Pope, 223, 341, 
387 f., 504 f., 670. 

Skelton, J., 283. 

Sleidan, 587 f., 704 f. 

Smith, H., 635. 

Socinians, 376. 

Somascians, 397. 

Somerset, E. Seymour, Duke 
of, 310, 352, 359. 

Sophocles, 574. 

Soto, H. de, 437. 

Sozini, F., 145, 375, 626. 

Sozini, L., 142, 145, 375. 

Spain 
universities, 12, 673. 
Charles V, 76. 
literature, 135. 



Spain (continued) 

and Netherlands, 238, 

246 ff., 430, 488. 
and England, 318 f., 332, 

339 ff., 348, 431 f . 
Armada, 341 f ., 387, 433. 
civilization, 350. 
and papacy, 378 ff. 
and Counter-reformation, 

389. 
Jesuits, 405. 
colonies, 407, 425, 430 f., 

435 ff. 
Inquisition, 412 ff. 
censorship, 419. 
unification, 426. 
revolt of Communes, 78, 

427 f ., 477, 550, 552. 
revolt of Hermandad, 78, 

428, 552. 
empire, 430. 
Cortes, 428 f. 
and Portugal, 432 f . 
and Moors, 433 f. 
population, 455 ff. 
coinage, 463. 
finances, 480, 522. 
navy, 490 f . 
clergy, 494. 
trade, 524 f . 
the Mesta, 624. 
reform of calendar, 624. 
judged by Froude, 717. 
Spencer, H., 718. 
Spenser, E., 327, 347, 692 f . 
Spinoza, B., 276. 
Spires, 666. 
Diet of (1526), 114. 
Diet of (1529), 109, 115, 

644. 
Diet of (1542), 122. 
Diet of (1544), 123. 
Sprenger, J., 654. 



INDEX 



857 



Spurs, battle of the, 279. 
Stael, do, 715. 
SterHng, 356. 

Steven Bathoiy, King of Po- 
land, 144. 
Stevin, S., 610, 614. 
Stockholm, 9, 136. 
Stourbridge, 523. 
Stow, J., 582. 
Strabo, 574. 

Strassburg, 31, 101, 110, 113, 
169, 260, 464, 506, 
658. 
Strauss, D. F., 719. 
Stiihlingen, 91, 93. 
Stuniea, D., 622. 
Suffolk, 323. 

Charles Brandon, Duke of, 
316. 

Henry Grey, Duke of, 316. 
Suleiman, Sultan, 187, 449. 
Sully, Duke of, 215, 218, 228. 
Sumatra, 443, 616. 
Surrey, Earl of, 693. 
Suso, H., 31. 
Sussex, 323. 
Swabia, 93 ff., 119. 
Sweden 

universities, 12. 

Reformation, 113, 137 f. 

Christian II, 136. 

war with Poland, 139. 

population, 458. 

a law of, 511. 

church property, 551. 
Switzerland, 88, 146 f. 

Reformation, 146-181. 

civilization, 350. 

population, 454. 
Symonds, J. A., 398, 730. 
Syria, 449, 535. 

Taborites, 40. 



Tacitus, 574, 606. 

Tangier, 446. 

Tapper, 254. 

Tartaglia, N., 610, 614. 

Tartars, 139, 447. 

Tasso, T., 374, 449, 628, 692 f. 

Tauler, J., 31, 65. 

Tetzel, J., 66 f. 

Teutonic Order, 31, 44 f ., 113, 

139, 618. 
Tewkesbury, J., 299. 
Theater, 485, 695 ff. 
Theatines, 384, 397. 
Theocritus, 574. 
Theognis, 574. 
Thierry, 718, 
Thorn, 618. 

Edict of, 140. 
Thou, de, 217, 703. 
Thucydides, 574. 
Tierra del Fuego, 616. 
Tintoretto, 677. 
Titian, 677 f. 
Tobacco, 498. 
Toledo, 428, 457. 

Enriquez de, 502. 
Toleration, 641-51. 

Peace of Augsburg, 131. 

Edict of Nantes, 229 f. 

and Bible, 573. 

intolerance of Catholics, 
641 ff. 

intolerance of Protestants, 
643 ff. 

Renaissance, 649. 

Reformation, 650 f ., 750. 
Tolstoy, L., 730. 
Tordesillas, Treaty of, 435. 
Torgau, League of, 114. 
Torquemada, 643. 
Toul, 184, 200. 
Toulouse, 214. 
Toumai, 235, 274. 



858 



INDEX 



Tours, 195, 197. 
Transubstantiation, 

rejected by Wyclif, 37. 

rejected by Taborites, 40. 

attacked by Melanchthon 
and Luther, 70, 72. 

Lateran Council, 108. 

in Augsburg Confession, 
117. 

in England, 306, 314. 

and Council of Trent, 393. 
Transylvania, 144 f . 
Treitschke, 736 f ., 742. 
Trent, Council of, 388-96. 

and Protestants, 127, 383, 
389 f., 393. 

decrees in France, 215. 

reforms, 231, 382, 388, 
393 ff., 486. 

decrees in England, 333 f . 

opening, 381, 390. 

and Pius IV, 385. 

preparation, 389 &. 

constitution, 390 f. 

dogmatic decrees, 391 ff,, 
566. 

result, 395 f. 

and Index, 420 ff. 

and charity, 561. 

political theoiy, 606. 

and reason, 625. 

and Louvain, 672. 

and art, 690. 

judged by Sarpi, 705. 
Treves, 74, 84, 657 f . 

University of, 11, 666. 

Diet of Treves-Cologne, 
530. 
Trie, William, 177. 
Trinity College, Dublin, 349, 

671. 
Troeltsch, E., 732 ff. 
Tiibingen, University of, 11. 



Tunis, 121. 

Tunstall, C, 38, 282, 284, 305. 

Turks, 

capture Constantinople, 16. 

war with Germany, 46, 116, 
122, 132. 

war with Hungary, 144. 

conquer Transylvania, 145. 

alliance with France, 200. 

and papacy, 383. 

and Spain, 432. 

empire, 448 ff. 

army, 489. 

trade, 535. 
Tuscany, 372. 

Duke of, 613. 
Tyler, Wat, 37. 
Tyndale, W., 284 f ., 300, 304, 
355, 570 f., 596. 

Udal, N., 471, 663. 

Ukraine, 140. 

Ulm, 113, 128. 

Ulster, 348. 

Unitarians, 142 f., 145, 177, 

375, 626, 646. 
Universities 

in fifteenth century, 11 f. 

and Reformation, 12. 

reform of, 72. 

and Henry VIII, 287. 

pay of professors, 471. 

in sixteenth century, 668 ff, 
Unterwalden, 146, 153. 
Upsala, University of, 12. 
Uri, 146, 153. 
Ursulines, 397. 
Usingen, 637. 
Usury, 72, 529 f ., 608 f. 
Utrecht, 235, 238, 240, 252, 
268, 272, 274. 

Union of, 272, 650. 

Vaga, P. del, 690. 



INDEX 



859 



Valais, 146 f. 
Valangin, 161. 
Valdes, J. de, 376. 
Valence, University of, 11. 
Valencia, 428. 

University of, 12. 
Valla, L., 16, 48 ff., 649. 

Donation of Constantine, 
48, 70. 

Annotations on New Testor- 
ment, 49, 566 f . 

Dialogue on Free Will, 50, 
105. 

On Monastic Life, 50. 

On Pleasure, 50. 
Valliere, J., 191. 
Van Dyke, 276. 
Varthema, L. de, 446. 
Vasari, G., 582 f., 676, 679. 
Vassy, massacre of, 214. 
Velasco, 457. 
Velasquez, 433. 
Venezuela, 457. 
Venice, 372, 402, 512. 

war with Julius II, 19. 

alliance with France, 186. 

and Reformation, 375 f. 

Inquisition, 417, 658. 

trade, 442, 525, 535. 

population, 456. 

coinage, 463 f. 

bank, 522. 

church property, 551. 

art, 677. 
Verdun, 184, 200. 
Vergerio, P. P., 377, 390. 
Vergil, Polydore, 581, 703. 
Vermigli, P. M., 213, 312, 

322, 375. 
Verona, 455. 
Vespucci, A., 436, 606 f. 
Vettori, 704. 
Vienna, 448 f . 



Vienna {continued) 

Concordat of, 45. 

University of, 149, 406, 666, 
670. 
Vienne, 168, 177. 
Vieta, F., 610 f . 
Villalar, battle of, 428. 
Villavicenzio, L. da, 561. 
Villers, C. de, 714. 
Villiers, 258 f . 
Vilvorde, 284 f . 
Vitrier, J., 26, 57. 
Vives, L., 559 f., 574, 606, 

609, 667. 
Voes, H., 242. 
Volmar, M., 162. 
Voltaire, 388, 707 f. 
Volterra, D. da, 690. 

Wages and salaries, 469 ff., 

556 f. 
Waitz, 737. 

Waldenses, 35, 82, 203. 
Waldo, P., 35. 
Waldseemiiller, M., 616. 
Wales, 298, 323, 453, 458, 

559. 
Arthur, Prince of, 286 f. 
Walker, W., 739. 
Walloons, 260, 270 f. 
Walsingham, 305, 499. 
Walsingham, F., 347. 
Warham, W., 557. 
Warsaw, Compact of, 143, 

650. 
Waterford, 347. 
Wealth of the world, 458 ff. 
Weber, M., 728. 
Wedderburn, James, 355. 
Wedderburn, John, 355. 
Weinsberg, 94. 
Weiss, N., 738. 
Welser bank, 520 f . 



860 



INDEX 



Werner, 715. 
Wernle, 739. 
Westeras, Diet of, 137. 
West Indies, 274, 436 f., 524, 

535. 
Westmoreland, 304. 
Weyer, J., 658 f . 
White, Andrew D., 731. 
Widmanstetter, A., 622. 
Wied, H. von, 120. 
Wieland, 711. 
Wilna, 144. 
Wilson, W., 743. 
Winchester, 323, 662. 
Wishart, G., 357 f. 
Witchcraft, 63, 422, 651-61. 
ancient magic, 651 f. 
the witch, 652 f. 
the devil, 653. 
the Inquisition, 655. 
Protestantism, 655 f. 
the witch hunt, 656 ff. 
growing skepticism, 658 ff. 
Wittenberg, 66, 81 ff., 961, 
128, 240, 301, 322 
note, 354 f., 390, 461, 
464, 5601 
University of, 11, 64, 287, 
471, 494, 502, 509, 
620ff., 639, 670, 6961 
Concord, 110. 
Articles, 301. 
Wolsey, T., 243, 518, 671. 
character and policy, 280 f ., 

292, 294. 
and Eeformation, 282 1, 

355. 
death, 288. 
Women, position of, 361, 

5091 
Worms, 284. 

Concordat of, 43. 
Diet of (1495), 75. 



Worms (continued) 

Diet of (1521), 78 ff., 96, i 

282, 398. 
Diet of (1545), 123. 
Edict of, 81, 85, 114, 116, 

241, 479. 
Colloquy of, 122, 134. 
Wullenwever, G., 118. 
Wurttemberg, 79, 128. 

Ulrich, Duke of, 79, 90, 119. 
Wurzach, 95. 

Wurzburg, 114, 350, 454, 658. 
Wyatt, Sir T. (conspirator), 

318. 
Wyatt, Sir T. (poet), 693. 
Wyclif, J., 12. 
life and doctrine, 36 ff., 42, 

284. 
condemned at Constance, 

391 
and Reformation, 41, 289, 

354, 744. 
and Bible, 571. 

Xavier, F., 400, 4081, 499, 

736. 
Xenophon, 574. 
Ximenez, 426, 565. 

Yorkshire, 302 f ., 544. 
Ypres, 560. 

Zapolya, J., 144. 

Zasius, U., 103. 

Zeeland, 256, 260, 2631, 

270 ff. 
Zierickzee, 264. 
Zug, 146, 153. 
Zuiderzee, battle of, 262. 
Ziitphen, 262, 272. 

Henry of, 240. 
Zurich 

Anabaptists, 101, 154, 645. 



I 



INDEX 



861 



Zurich (continued) 

joins Swiss Confederacy, 
146. 

Zwingli, 151. 

Keformation, 152 ff. 

theocracy, 156. 

defeat at Cappel, 158 ff. 

Bullinger, 160. 

English Bible printed at, 
300. 

dancing, 500, 

brothels, 506. 

university, 671. 
'wickau, 82 f. 
Jwilling, G., 81, 83. 
Iwingli, A., 152. 
Iwingli, U. 

and Luther, 108 ff., 151 f., 
154. 

death, 110, 159. 

and Melanchthon, 134. 

and Calvin, 164, 166. 

early life, 148 ff. 

mocks indulgences, 150 f. 

at Zurich, 151. 

a Reformer, 152 ff. 

marriage, 152. 



Zwingli, U. (continued) 
and Erasmus, 153. 
and Anabaptists, 154 ff., 

645. 
political schemes, 157 f. 
True and False Religion, 

158. 
Exposition of the Christian 

Faith, 158. 
First Peace of Cappel, 158. 
at battle of Cappel, 158 f. 
character, 159. 
influence in France, 196. 
doctrine of the eucharist, 

108 ff., 154, 241. 
influence in England, 284. 

299. 
and Council of Trent, 392. 
on Index, 420. 
biblical exegesis, 569. 
political theory, 596. 
on usury, 608 f . 
on reason, 626. 
on education, 671. 
judged by Bossuet, 703. 
judged by Voltaire, 708. 
judged by Gibbon, 710. 
Zwolle, 240. 



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